About The Blog

To everyone who's been reading regularly: thanks!

Every time i reach x00 number of posts i keep thinking "there's no way i'm doing another 100". But once again it seems that i did. At least the rate at which i'm writing them is slowing down and that's about the only thing i'm willing to guarantee for who knows how many or little posts i'll write in the future. I've gone over the archives to pick the posts that i currently think of as the most important ones i've written. Out of 599 posts, i only came up with 7

Many of the posts i've written have become irrelevant, useless or no longer consistent with how i think about things right now. And some of the posts are still important, though they too will sooner or later join the group of posts that ultimately don't matter anymore because they focused on specific technologies or approaches, all of which are sure to become outdated at some point in the future.

But these 7 posts that i selected are things i hope to still believe in 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now. Technical posts are temporal in nature, whereas i hope (and suspect) these posts will stand the test of time:

1. Start Believing In Yourself
2. Wanna Improve Your Life? Then DO Something About It!
3. Walk Out On Sources Of Negativity
4. Developers Shouldn’t Specialize
5. Favor Value Over Quality
6. If You Can’t Say Something Bad About It, You Don’t Know It Well Enough
7. You Need To Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Lately, i've grown somewhat tired of this blog. Well, i've grown tired with how it looks specifically. But there were some other minor issues that started getting on my nerves. I even started contemplating the possibility of just writing my own blog engine so i'd have full control over everything. Luckily for me, i regained my senses soon enough and decided to stick with WordPress, but to spruce things up a little.

As you can see (unless you're reading this in your RSS reader), i've chosen an entirely new theme for the blog. The previous one wasn't actively supported anymore and it started to bore the hell out of me. This one is pretty different, but i like it. It's clean, simple and i don't think it's being used by any other tech blog

Another important change is that i've dropped the regular WordPress commenting system and finally switched to Disqus. There's nothing wrong with WordPress' commenting system but it is pretty basic and as of about 2 weeks ago, the majority of my server load came from filtering spam comments despite the CAPTCHA system i was forcing you to use. Needless to say, the ability to offer a lot more functionality to people who are willing to leave comments without having to bother them with some annoying CAPTCHA system, while at the same time offloading the burden of spam filtering entirely on 3rd party services was a no brainer

Also, no more ads. They're gone from the site as well as the RSS feed. Nobody wants to see those anyway and it's not like i need the extra pocket change so there's no reason to keep them around

When i first started writing this blog i was entirely convinced of one thing: as long as you keep putting out good content, people will eventually start reading it. And they did. Well, not everyone of course, but i'm pretty happy with the size of the audience that i can reach these days with my blog. It sure took me long enough to build up that audience. I started blogging about 3,5 years ago and back then there were only a handful of you who checked in regularly. These days, i'm gradually approaching 3000 subscribers and i'm obviously pretty happy with that, not to mention proud because i did it on my own, without any big name company behind me or any big name bloggers regularly pushing other people to read my stuff. And i did it my way. I broke many of the so called 'rules' of 'successful blogging' but there really are very few posts that i regret writing (though there are some, trust me).

But in one way, it was easy to build up that audience since i generally stayed close to one topic: .NET development. Lately though, i've been focusing on Ruby a lot which has led to some interesting things. First of all, some of my readers have complained about the complete lack of .NET related content lately. And at the same time, i've noticed increases in the subscriber count every time i publish Ruby-related posts. The thing is: i no longer want to restrict myself to a single topic or even community. I'm gonna write about Ruby occasionally, and there will still be .NET related posts from time to time as well. It all kinda depends on what i'm working with, and what piques my interest. It could pretty much go into any direction in the future. And some of my posts won't be directly related to any kind of technology, but will be targeted to software developers in general no matter what language you code in. And others will just be rants that i have to get off my chest or opinion-posts on whatever subject i want to touch on.

So, if you started following this blog because of the .NET posts that i used to write frequently, you might be disappointed with what's going to end up on this blog in the future. Then again, you might not be. And if you recently started following this blog because of the Ruby posts, you might be disappointed as well soon. But hey, you might not be. While this blog used to be predominantly about .NET, it no longer is. And even though there were quite a few Ruby posts recently, that doesn't mean that Ruby is going to be the most occurring topic on this blog either. It's not about any specific technology. It's about my journey through life as a software developer. And i'd rather not restrict the boundaries of that journey in any way.

Don't worry, this post isn't about the ongoing political problems that Belgium has been suffering from for the past 3 years. It's about something far more interesting (ahem): the way they read my blog. I was going over the blog's stats for last month:

As you can see, the numbers for the Belgians are far different than they are for each other country in that list. The number of pages they read each visit is way above the average. The average time they spend on this site is also much higher than most countries. And the percentage of new visitors and the bounce rate is a lot lower than what we see from other countries. That means that almost 4 out of 5 Belgians that visit this site have been here before, and keeping the total number of visits in mind and the fact that it has a much smaller population than the other countries in the top 7, they seem to keep coming back as well. And this isn't just an anomaly because the all-time stats for this blog show pretty much the same picture:

So that makes me wonder: what's up with these Belgians? And yes, i know that some of you are probably thinking: "well duh, it's because you're Belgian too!". But there are a couple of reasons why i don't think that me being from Belgium explains it:

• The Google Analytics plugin that i'm using does not count my own visits
• I do very, very little networking so it's not like i'm often in contact with a lot of Belgian developers to plug my blog
• I don't go to developer events to evangelize my ideas, in fact, i generally don't go to developer events
• I don't give talks or presentations, except for one that i did on NHibernate a year ago. And i don't see myself doing a lot of talks in the future either since i have no idea what i'd talk about.

So, it can't be because i've been pushing this blog among the Belgian developers. So what is it then? Is it because we Belgians are generally quite thorough when it comes to learning about stuff we like? Or are we just lazy and do we love to waste a lot of time online? Both are true to some degree . Either way, it's nice to see Belgium among the top of a list (even if it doesn't mean shit) that isn't related to female tennis, chocolate, beer, organized crime or fraud.

Seriously though, i do find this kind of stuff interesting so if you are Belgian (or are familiar with how Belgians are) and have some ideas on why those numbers are so different from other countries, please do share