The 1000th post

· August 27, 2015

Marcus private   Life of a consultant

Just ran a my count script into the _posts directory of my Jekyll installation. 999! and then I started this post.

That means that this is the 1000th post on my blog!

I only have 3 words: Un. Believe. Able.

I never, ever thought that I would write 1000 posts.

Through this blog I’ve learned so much, connected with so many people and got so many opportunities I never would have got without “throwing myself out there”.

This post has two parts: history and stats.

History

I wrote the first post on the 24th of October 2006 and in that very trembling first steps I actually wrote somethings that still hold:

This is my first ever publication on the Internet.
I am not sure yet what to put down here but I hope that it will be meaningful, for me if not for any other.

I actually started the blog after losing 3 paper notebooks in 2 weeks. And with them a lot of important learnings.

The beginnings were very humble; something about tools I used, stupid bets made with co-workers and a bit on feelings(!).

VERY few readers of course in the beginning. This was pre-social media and “getting out there” was a bit harder. I really didn’t think about getting out there either, since this was mostly for me.

The early posts are more about me than about things I used. That changed after about 1 year and I blogged more about things at work. In the posts, I can see how the things that I worked with affect what I’m writing about.

Early posts should today merely have been a tweet

Throughout all blogging I’ve always written more in busy times and less in idle times. That also affects what I’ve written about. I’ve used it as an outlet for my thoughts and in doing so forced myself to think a little bit how to formulate it. That’s been good for me.

There are some watershed discoveries that I didn’t really think too much about at the time that proved very important in the long run.

Through the years (my God - you can really say that…) I’ve kept through to my original intention. Blogging for learning. Learning by sharing.

Stats

Let’s crunch some stats. Because that’s fun.

In total nearly 500,000 pages have been viewed on the site. Mind. Blown!

The progress over the years has been one of very slow start, slowly increase, incredible spike for that one post (see Events below), slowly creeping up, and then the last year steadily increasing.

Early on I decided to blog in English. That was ridiculous at the time but has proven very educational for me (training in writing English so much) and good for spreading the reach of the blog. I have not regretted that decision a single time. I’ve felt stupid sometimes but not regret it.

The most viewed posts are shown here, my comments below:

1. Share your internet connection via WiFi on Windows 8.1 - This is a typical post for the early days of the blog (although this is written in 2014). I had a problem. I researched it. Found a couple of sources. Wrote something together. Have looked back to this post many times already for personal use.
2. Uninstall package with NuGet–and remove dependencies - I was into NuGet for a while. This post was about a problem I had. Didn’t remember the second time, wrote it down.
3. Using tags in SpecFlow features - SpecFlow is by far the tool I’ve spent most time in helping out with, speaking about and evangelizing. This is a feature that not many people know about. I’m very happy it’s on my top 5
4. Error “The provider did not return a ProviderManifestToken string” with SQL Compact Edition - I love posts like this. I don’t even remember what this is anymore. I remember this error message and I’m happy I wrote it down.
5. Are you coding for change or for stability? - by far most-read-in-a-week post. I am proud of this post for its content too.

Events

Some stuff that has happened over the years. In no particular order.

• 2007 in January is the first time I mention Scrum. Kanban in 2009. Open source was mentioned for the first time in September 2007

• In November 2014 I moved my blog from Blogger, where you still can read posts up to that date, to Jekyll.

• I’ve had the domain name www.marcusoft.net since August 2007.

• In March 2015 I started to do my own logging that you can find links to from every post.

• In April 2012 I published the news about writing Kanban in Action. I was quite shocked at the time, as the post reflects. In January 2014 the book was released…. about 2,5 years after first starting it.

• In 2011 I released SpecFlow.Assist.Dynmaic that actually has almost 20000 downloads on NuGet

• In April 2013 my big hit came. The post on what we optimize for in development was picked up on Reddit and for a few days… It was crazy. About 15,000 hits in 3 days. Man I was nervous then. What did I really write…? I still think it’s one of the best posts on my blog.

3 longest posts

These are all worth reading.

1. Testing in Simple Data - 89 kb
2. SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic - how to use it - 50 kb
3. SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic - what is it - 50 kb

3 shortest posts

Nobody will find anything interesting in these

1. I’m cheering over fat clients
2. A link to a site with MSBuild recipes
3. Voj voj voj, a link to a funny web page

Nerdy stats

Here’s some diagrams over when I have posted: From this we can see that I wrote more posts before, but better now maybe?

Also March seems like a very productive month a year for me, while July is not. Not surprising since that’s when Sweden have our famous 5 weeks vacation. Kudos to me for not writing a lot of posts then!

Day in the month when I’m most productive should be 15 maybe. Definitely more posts in the beginning of the month than in the end.

I blog more and more the further we get into the week. Less blogging on weekends. Kudos again!

Conclusion

I love blogging and sharing… and learning. I have no intention of stopping this any time soon. This post was very encouraging to write for me - I hope you got something out of this too.

Just writing for yourself is, of course, very boring. The blog would have been nothing with anyone reading, commenting, and challenging me. For this, I thank you all so much. You make me (and hence this blog) better than it otherwise would have been.

From the bottom of my heart; Thank you, all! From the first post up to now my life is very very different. Better.

I’ll let the end of my first post sum up the first 1000 posts:

So - that was the start…. Let’s see where this leads.

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