Ten years ago today I started this blog.
I really can’t believe that sentence just looking at it. But during that time I’ve learned so much by putting my understanding into words and out on the internet that I really cannot value the experience of having a blog enough.
In this post I wanted to share a few highlights from the 1066 posts (including this) I’ve written and all the stories and relations it has created.
(Full disclosure; much of this has been written in a previous blog post, celebrating my 1000th post. It’s worth repeating (and updating) since it covers basically the same things.)
History
I wrote the first post on the 24 of October 2006 and in that very trembling first steps I actually wrote somethings that still holds:
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 loosing 3 paper notebooks in 2 weeks. And with them a lot of important learnings.
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, practices and processes at work. In the posts I can see how the things that I worked with affects what I’m writing about.
Some 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’s 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 I’ve kept through to my original intention
Blogging for learning. Learning by sharing.
Stats
Let’s crunch some stats. Because that’s still fun.
In total more than nearly 800.000 pages has been viewed on the site. And that number was 500.000 just 14 months ago. Mind. Blown. To. Small. Pieces….
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:
- Uninstall package with NuGet–and remove dependencies - I was into NuGet for awhile. This post was about a problem I had. Didn’t remember the second time, wrote it down.
- Root - well the root of the site is viewed a lot. Expected I guess, I’m not counting it.
- 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.
- Using tags in SpecFlow features - SpecFlow is by far the tool I’ve spent most time in helping out with, speaking about and evanglizing. This is a feature that not many people knows about. I’m very happy it’s on my top 5
- Marcus Node Bits: supertest is a nice way to test an api - I started to do Node development in Indonesia when i was a bit bored at my normal work. Happy to see two of these post make it into the top 5. This is about a tool i’ve used a lot to test drive APIs in Koa
- Marcus Node Bits: Express is best without generators - Here’s another one about using the Express framework without generators. I ended up ditching it altogether for Koa later..
Events
Here’s some of the things that have 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 Mars 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 have 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. Funnily it’s now not on my top 10 list anymore…
I started to write my second (!?!!!) book in 2016 - I’m still getting over the shock of publishing the first one. You can start to read the RS Bungsu book already now. Get on it - it’s amazing.
I’ve been nominated for an international award - which is just beyond me. People in the kanban community think that I’ve contributed enough to be nominated to an award. Amazing!
3 longest posts
These are all worth reading.
- Testing in Simple Data - 89 kb
- SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic - how to use it - 50 kb
- SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic - what is it - 50 kb
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 in weekends. Kudos again!
Conclusion
I love blogging and sharing… and learning. I have no intention stopping this any time soon. I’ve noticed that I’m blogging less intensely now but a little bit more thoughtfully… hopefully.
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 different. Better.
I’ll let the end of my first post sum up the first 10 years too, as I did with the first 1000 posts:
So - that was the start…. Lets see where this leads.