Looking Back At 2017

2017 was another great year in my training. I moved to a new city for the first time, completed 50% of my critical care fellowship, turned 30 years old, and am still going strong! It was also the first year where I regularly started writing lessons, doing Instagram Live teaching sessions, and sharing my love of teaching with the public domain utilizing social media. Your feedback and comments continue to drive me to pursue this interest! 🙂

The following table represents some basic statistics. The numbers in parentheses are percent changes in comparison to the preceding year.

2017 GADGETS

• Apple iPad Pro 9.7″
• NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti
• Logitech G413 keyboard
• TaoTronics Sound Bar
• Google Pixel 2
• Samsung Gear S3
• Apple MacBook Pro
• Anker PowerCore+ 20100 USB-C
• Apple iPhone X
  

RK.MD TOP POSTS

• USMLE Epidemiology And Biostatistics Notes
• Basal/Bolus vs Sliding Scale Insulin In The Hospital
• My Residency Intern Year In Retrospect – Tips For Success
• Hand Vein Peripheral Intravenous Cannulation
• Reading Chest X-Rays
• What Are Categorical, Preliminary, Transitional, and Advanced Years In Residency?
• Extubation Criteria and Failure
  

RK.MD USER METRICS

Pretty significant changes in terms of user metrics on this site too!

WORDPRESS PLUGINS

Here’s a rundown of the plugins I currently use on RK.md running on WordPress 4.9.1.

• Akismet Anti-Spam (anti-spam)
• AMP (adds support for accelerated mobile pages)
• Better Social Counter Widget (social counter widget)
• Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP (incorporate Yoast metadata into AMP)
• Jetpack by WordPress.com (suite of powerful features – contact form, Gravatar Hovercards, Protect, etc.)
• RK.md Scripts (my own functions to perform various operations across the site)
• SG Optimizer (SiteGround host optimizer)
• WPBakery Page Builder – Visual Composer (page builder plugin)
• Yoast SEO Premium (all-in-one search engine optimization suite)

I also optimize all of my images using ImageOptim and JPEGMini Pro before uploading them to my server. I’m actually pretty happy with this set of plugins in terms of balancing functionality, security, and optimization. 🙂

2018

2018 will be a challenging year – I’ll be taking my anesthesiology oral boards in March, transitioning to my cardiothoracic anesthesiology fellowship in July, and taking my critical care boards in October. I hope to continue making the most of my time here in Boston to further myself as a perioperative physician and academician. Stay tuned for more of my journey. I cannot thank you all for so many thoughtful words of thanks, reassurance, recommendations, and questions via direct message, comments, and emails!