I’ve realised recently that I’m not posting to this blog at the frequency that I have done in the past and so this post is just to flag that I’m aware of it and I’m pausing my posts over the Summer in order to regroup.

I started posting to ‘a blog’ back in 2003 when I was working in developer consultancy for Microsoft and I was finding that there were things that I was doing in my day job that I thought it would be useful to share and also some ‘spare time’ projects that I needed a home for. Blogs at the time were coming into vogue with RSS Readers showing up everywhere. I think I even wrote a few of my own at the time.

The blogging activity wasn’t part of my job and the company took no interest in what I was writing.

In the 15 years that seem to have magically gone by, I’ve published around 150 posts per year as the website has been migrated from MoveableType to CommunityServer and on to WordPress where it lives today minus some tags and formatting that got messed up along the way.

During that time, I also migrated from Microsoft’s developer consultancy team into the developer evangelism group and I’ve been involved with and have written about a much broader set of developer technologies than I’d ever really expected to when I started posting in 2003. Those technologies have been centred around .NET but have branched out into many other places.

I had a look at the posts on the site and along the way I’ve written about C++, C#, COM, .NET, Tablet PCs, IIS, SQL, BizTalk Server, WSE, ClickOnce, ASMX, ASP.NET, Windows, Windows Phone, WPF, WCF, WF, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, Debugging, Silverlight, LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services & OData, MEF, Reactive Extensions, WinJS, JavaScript, UWP, WinRT, Xamarin, Azure Mobile Services, RealSense, HoloLens, Mixed Reality and perhaps a few more 🙂

My approach has always been to keep hands-on and take a code-first path to learning new things and I’ve always tried to learn in public publishing posts along the way which I hoped might help others who might follow a similar path at a later point even if they weren’t necessarily perfect or complete.

When I joined the evangelism team, its activity was mainly around in-person developer events and so a blog was a ‘nice to have’ but over time the activity of the team shifted to more of an online model and I found that my blog started to intersect much more with the day job.

That intersection followed something of an arc where the level of interest that my job had in my blogging ramped from pretty much zero through to a period where there was much more focus on it and my management at the time wanted to steer what I was posting about (I avoided that) and to move my hosting to MSDN (also avoided) and to add analytics for their charts and reports (I gave in on that one :-)). At its peak, I can remember having some slightly warm discussions about who owned my website but that didn’t last very long and the focus soon faded away as has the developer evangelism group itself.

Today, I’ve gone full circle in that I’m in a different job role and am mostly back to where I was in 2003 in having a site that’s largely a hobby and is related to  my ‘day job’ only by way of it providing some topics for me to think and write about.

So, it feels like a good time to pause & see whether I can come up with some themes that might set me onto another 15 years of posting

In the meantime, a big thanks to everyone who’s been reading these pieces along the way & who has provided feedback via the site or by mail – it’s much appreciated!