I was just checking the stats on the justforfunc channel and … whoa over 4 years of watch time during 2017! That means there’s been four people continuously watching my videos for a whole year.

To those four incredibly dedicated fans, huge thanks and … are you OK?

Anyway, I thought it would be a good moment to see how the channel has evolved during 2017 and what videos have been the most successful.

First some stats

The channel is doing great. We recently passed 10k subscribers (which I celebrated with this video) and the number keeps growing! Look at these numbers, stat!

So without any more ado, let’s go with the top five videos of 2017!

#5: Unit Testing HTTP servers

This video was a fun one to do and I think it’s been very successful because it covers something people care about.

Testing HTTP servers is not necessarily easy and most people have no idea on how to use http.ResponseRecorder or even that it exists!

justforfunc #16: unit testing HTTP servers

#4: Flappy Gopher

The first episode of a series of three videos that I started after attending GoLab.io in Florence early 2017. Why was this one successful? I mean … it shows you how to develop a Flappy Bird clone in Go!

The best thing of this episode is that I got many people sending me messages sharing their own projects. And the code was used in a program to teach children Go.

#3 A Text to Speech server with gRPC and Kubernetes

Was this episode the answer to “how many buzzwords can you include in a title”? We’ll never know … well, you’ll never know!

But the result is a fun video where I develop a distributed version of the say command available on Mac, using flite, Docker, Kubernetes, Go, and all of the other things cool kids do.

#2 The Context Package

I’ve received so many notes regarding this episode. Many many people tell me it’s the clearest introduction to the context package they’ve ever seen.

Maybe it’s because this episode was the result of a talk I gave four times before? Probably, but I want to believe it’s because I’m wearing the coolest t-shirt I own.

And last and definitely not least (because we’re counting down, so …)

#1 Go Tooling in Action

This video is the one that inspired me to create the channel. Its success is not really surprising as I keep on building on it by developing a full day workshop based on the materials I once developed for GOTO Chicago.

The video is so old that it doesn’t even have the justforfunc branding, since it didn’t exist yet!

What’s your favorite?

So what’s your favorite episode? Is it on this list or maybe it’s another one of the 26 episodes I’ve released so far!

Let me know on twitter @francesc and send any feedback or suggestions for the channel to form.justforfunc.com.

Thanks (and super thanks to my patrons!)

Thanks to all the subscribers for an amazing 2017, and to my patrons for allowing me to improve the recording material (now that I don’t work for Google anymore).

You can become one of my patrons on patreon.com/justforfunc, and in exchange you’ll have my eternal gratitude!

https://patreon.com/justforfunc