This is my 500th post on CodeBetter, and as Dogbert would say, it’s a big, round, scary number. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever make it to a 1,000, so I’ll do my retrospective now. It’s been a fun ride and I’d like to think Brendan for running CodeBetter and making it what it is. I’ve met a lot of people through blogging and probably gotten some opportunities that I would have missed otherwise.
I originally started the blog with some fuzzy idea of writing about TDD and other Agile practices to help the other .Net developers in my then company adopt and use those practices. I don’t know if any of that stuff ever helped my company, but I’ve gotten a lot out of writing the blog posts. It’s hard to imagine now from the constant chatter on my RSS feed and the ALT.NET groups, but three years ago Agile and .Net was a pretty rare combination.
I don’t particularly have any kind of agenda anymore with the blog, but I still enjoy writing it. I do need to slow down my blogging rate for the rest of the year to concentrate on other projects and that pesky little “day job” thing. The .Net blogosphere is a much richer, more vibrant place now and doesn’t seem to be stopping. Many of my favorite bloggers started in the last 12 months, and I figure that there’s probably more great bloggers just waiting to get started.
I’m probably taking the next couple weeks off of writing because I’m finally making my move back to Austin late next week and things will be crazy at home. I’ll see you next month with the rest of “First Causes” and maybe some more ”Build your own CAB” stuff.
I’ve put together a pair of “Best Of’s,” you know, like a country music artist that has one hit song and cuts a Greatest Hits package the next year:
Best of the Shade Tree Developer and Best of the Shade Tree Developer Part II.
The relevant stats are 500 posts, 3,334 comments, and 1,458 trackbacks. My most popular post is Test Driven Development with ASP.Net and the Model View Presenter Pattern, which is a bit ironic because I’ve even put up a warning message on that post pushing people to look at MonoRail or the MVC framework instead of the MVP pattern for web development. A couple months after that I read the Pragmatic Programmer’s book on Ruby on Rails and I’ve hated that ASP.NET post ever since. If I had to pick my favorite post, I’d go with My Programming Manifesto.
Anyway, thanks to all of you who read, comment on, and link to this thing. Here’s looking to another three years or so.
