Well, I nearly did it! The Mobile Jon blog published an article a week EVERY week until the last week of December. Sadly, between COVID and everything else going on I ran out of gas. Today, I thought I would share some of my great successes from 2021, a few great things I learned, and some real appreciation for those who contributed to some real light bulb moments. Let’s cover some highlights from last year.

What Happened in 2021 in the Mobile Jon Blog

2021 overall was a really strong year for me. My blog did quite well with views overall:

As you can see, I was fortunate to be overall consistent. In my 4th full year, I experienced growth of 50K hits. A strong year of 91K+ was my end result, which I can say I’m very proud of. Let’s cover some of the highlights.

I had the pleasure of speaking at VMworld in two separate sessions along with presenting at EUC Day 2021. I think as someone who truthfully sometimes correlates his own self-worth to blog hits, it was interesting to see how different things would impact my blog.

My blog would set career days several times in 2021, with my best being 915 hits on June 21, 2021. That would coincide with my 2021 article Evaluating Endpoint Manager vs. Workspace ONE UEM: 2021 Edition. I thought overall it was pretty amusing to see how things would go at different times.

Sometimes I would post a link in a vExpert session and I would get a nice jump, but then at a VMworld session I had very little movement. It was quite peculiar. Let’s cover my articles in 2021 and how it broke down.

Article Breakdown in 2021

My breakdown is sort of interesting when you look at it.

Page	Hits
Homepage	9252
Evaluating Intune against Workspace ONE UEM	4936
Workspace ONE and Intune Integration is FINALLY Coming	3683
Deep Dive into WS1 UEM Components on the UAG	3613
Lessons Learned with O365 Information Rights Management	3328
Evaluating Intune against Workspace ONE UEM: MacOS Edition	2811
Boxer vs. Outlook for iOS 2020 Showdown	2297
Evaluating Endpoint Manager vs. Workspace ONE UEM: 2021 Edition	2280
Bending Dell Command Update 3.1 To Your Will	2249
Applying the Agile Methodology to the Modern Workplace	2082
Lessons Learned in Workspace ONE Windows 10 Management	2024
Evaluating Intune against Workspace ONE UEM: Windows Edition	1950
An Introduction to the Workspace ONE MacOS Hub CLI	1939
A Foray into Working with the VMWare Workspace ONE APIs	1761
Surviving the Politics of IT as an Architect with ADHD	1256

So, I wonder how many you read of these. Outside of my loyal readers, most people read my Intune stuff and maybe nothing else, but I’m unsure. I do love the consistency though. Only one article accounted for over 5% of my hits being my famous Intune vs. Workspace ONE UEM article. I mostly show this just because it’s interesting.

The article that meant more to me than anything was writing about ADHD. It’s always super surreal to me when I realize that my words matter and people actually read my content. I decided that it was time to start speaking up about ADHD and the support was amazing. I even had the pleasure of speaking with Nick Korte and his amazing Nerd Journey Podcast co-starring John White.

It goes without saying, 2021 was very rewarding for me. Let’s cover some of the advice that I got in 2021 that helped my blog.

How Others Helped Make me Better

Since I hit my stride, I haven’t met many people that made me feel like I need to over-compensate. Johan van Amersfoort is that person who makes me feel like I’m a rookie. The man is pure gold and he had some great advice that grew my blog a bit in 2021. He said: “Jon, my blog doesn’t do much better than yours. I get most of my hits from Reddit.” I had a holy shit moment when he said that.

I was never a big Reddit guy, but I was shocked to see how much it did for my brand. VMware figured that out too as they went big into Reddit, Discord, etc. It’s been entertaining. I’ve learned how to Crosspost, had to defend my articles to Apple moderators, and fight the “On-Premise” police. I guess it was an interesting time for me.

Another person that really made me better was actually VMware. There’s a list of people that made huge differences in my blog and technical curiosity at VMware, which led to many of my ideas for my blog. Just to hit on a few of them:

• Josue Negron
• Mark Benson
• Martin Kniffin
• Max Blinder
• Rob Terakedis
• Hemant Sahani
• Lucas Chen
• Ashka Vakil
• Joe Rainone
• Sascha Warno

I have no doubt that there are many more. I felt so lucky to have gotten access to the VMware Internal Slack and get to speak/collaborate with so many areas within EUC at VMware. Many of my conversations made me curious and aspire to tinker and engineer ideas that grew into some of my best work.

What Did Mobile Jon Learn?

I learned some really cool stuff over the last year. One of the technical things that I learned was pushing the release notes to their limits.

I found it to be difficult to find things to write about every week. I spent a ton of time reviewing release notes for Workspace ONE and the UAG and building it out in my lab.

I also learned about diversification. My YouTube channel would debut in 2021 is progressing nicely. I only have 150 or some followers, but it is becoming a really solid resource. I’ve continued to learn that using more videos and less text is the way of the future.

Things have gone well enough to even see some of my videos gets 1k+ hits in 2021.

Sure, it’s not great, but from my perspective if I am helping people achieve their goals it’s successful enough for my liking.

I think my overall sentiment that I learned in 2021 is that you can deliver the quality and quantity if you are willing to be committed. It is truly a fallacy that you cannot do both. Being a content generator and making an impact is at minimum a part-time job, but something that is very rewarding.

So What is Next in 2022?

Unfortunately, I missed my mark by about 10% in 2021, which was a bit disappointing but I’m not a quitter. My 3 week gap in writing was from COVID for my family and more recently myself.

I’m very excited about 2022. Over the next few months, I have:

• Two sessions at EUC Day 2022 in February
• Debuting a new Word Add-in that my company developed at HIMSS 22 coined VeriSync
• Doing some amazing work with Freddie Mac to revolutionize the future of work
• Soon to be named one of the Top 100 Influencers for VMware (just learned this week)

I am also planning to open a Mobility/UEM Internship program at me and my wife’s company. THis will be coming by 2023 at he latest as a way of giving back and helping to develop the engineers of tomorrow. I hope everyone has enjoyed this short article that covers some of my great luck in 2021.