About The Blog

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

I just got the following comment on my post about MVVM being overrated:

Sorry, but you’re just talking.Where’s the code ?I mean you seem to have all the time in the world to just say things on your blog , but no time to put together a simple sample up.I seriously doubt you understand what you talk about.

As you can probably tell from my reaction, i got pretty pissed off. Normally, i don't let comments like that get to me. But in this case, i have been spending quite a bit of my personal time working on a sample and preparing the blog posts. I'm actually planning to spend quite a bit of my weekend on this (as i did last weekend), not to mention that i'm also gonna spend a couple of hours working on it during my day off tomorrow.

I'm not getting paid for any of this. In fact, i'm only getting shit for doing this. The handful of people who are looking at this because they're tired of the MSDN-way of developing things will appreciate it, but the vast majority of people who're gonna read it are going to complain because "it's too complicated!" or "i have to think too much!". Well, you know what? You're not the kind of developer i'm targeting anyway. If you stumble upon a post of mine about Silverlight or anything else that's hot in MSDN-land, you probably got here through a link-blog or a link on twitter. And in those cases, odds are pretty high that the way i think about software development and the way you think about it don't exactly match. And that's ok. I'll do what i wanna do in the way i feel it's right to do so, and i suggest you do the same. But pressuring me into backing up the stuff i say with code is not really gonna get you anything sooner. I'm still gonna do whatever it is that i'm gonna do in a time frame that suits me, not you.

And to top it all off, i just got the following reply from the same guy:

"I’ll just say this.

When you make a public statement , you better have some code ready to prove it."

Priceless, ain't it?

Ok... i know what i said before. And i don't know yet whether i was right or wrong. But it is starting to feel like i'm missing out on some good conversations due to not being on twitter so i figured "what the hell, i'm gonna give it a shot". So i've created an account (@davybrion) and i'm just gonna see how it goes. If i like it, i'll keep using it and i'll gladly state that i was wrong about the whole thing. If i don't like it, i'll get rid of the account and i'll let you know why . But however it's gonna turn out to be, at least this time it'll be an informed decision.

So... any tips from you twitter addicts on how to keep the signal-to-noise ratio down and how to make the whole experience as valuable as possible?

So this is my 500th post on this blog.  I know i said that i would end the tradition of posting the most popular recent (as in: within the last 100 posts) posts when i hit 400 but since 500 is such a nice number, i think it’s alright if i hit you guys with another link bonanza.  So i’m gonna post the links to the top 10 most popular posts of all time, as well as the top 10 most popular posts of the last 100.

Top 10 All Time:

1. Career Advice For Young Developers
2. At This Point, I’d Prefer Java Developers Over .NET Developers
3. NHibernate Mapping Examples (pretty outdated by now though)
4. Build Your Own Data Access Layer Series
5. Upgrading To NHibernate 2.1 (this is what happens when people are too lazy to read exception messages)
6. A Reading Guide To Becoming A Better Developer
7. Data Access Layer With NHibernate
8. Managing Your NHibernate Sessions
9. Sending NHibernate Entities Over The WCF Wire (i wish i never wrote this)
10. Request Response Service Layer Series

Top 10 Of The Last 100:

1. Why You Shouldn't Expose Your Entities Through Your Services
2. Using NHibernate In Your Service Layer
3. Hey Microsoft, Our Databases Aren't Services!
4. Unit Testing An NHibernate Application
5. Avoiding Leaking Connections With NHibernate And TransactionScope
6. Agatha Vs NServiceBus
7. Do You Know What's Really Going On?
8. Dependency Injection Inversion Rejection
9. Real World Benefits From Loose Coupling, Inversion Of Control And Dependency Injection
10.  Virtual Method Performance Penalty

So… on to the next 100 i guess

Well, time for another short vacation. I'll be chilling and hanging out at the Côte d'Azur next week. I will have internet access but i'll probably make very little use of it. So, emails probably won't be replied to until July 13th and obviously, there won't be any posts either

See you in a week!