Off Topic

I finally got around to putting my new company website online. I originally planned to do this sometime last year, but it just kept getting postponed for a variety of reasons. I'm pretty bad at graphic/web design so I had the design done by Ken Bekaert since I thought he had already done a great job on my logo and business cards. Next up was the slicing of the design to HTML and CSS. I could theoretically do that myself, but it would've taken me way too long and I would not have enjoyed it one bit, so I preferred to have it done by some old friends who know what they're doing. After that, it was finally my turn to play around with it

So of course, I couldn't resist doing the site with Express/Node.js. And I'm pretty happy with the result too: about 130 lines of server-side code that allows me to write the content of the site in Markdown (including caching and automatically updating the cache if the Markdown files are updated) and my preferred solution to displaying feed items. Does a simple site like this call for Express/Node.js? Of course not. But I knew it would be simple and fun, so that's why I used it.

The hardest part was actually writing the content of the site. Apparently, writing content for a company website is a lot harder than churning out a few blog posts occasionally, and I definitely underestimated that. Not because there's a lot of content (there's very little actually), but because you want to avoid ending up with a lot of content. It has to be concise and yet still contain everything you want it to say. After many revisions, it says everything I want it to say, and unlike on this blog I actually managed to keep it short

An extra benefit of doing it with Express/Node.js is that it reminded me how much fun I have working with that stack, so I'm going to get back to work on my breakable toy which I've been neglecting for too long. I suppose this will lead to a few future posts as well

This was my first year working as an independent, and it's been quite a year. Things have gone very well, and I'm amazed at how quickly it all went by. This time last year, I was looking forward to start working for my first client though I didn't quite know what to expect. I hoped it would be interesting, and it certainly has been. I've been able to work with interesting technologies, with the kind of technical variety that I've come to really enjoy. I wrote more code in JavaScript than in C# this year, and I've also been able to do quite a bit of Ruby as well. I certainly didn't expect that going into this contract, so that was a major bonus. Even better than the technologies I've been able to work with this year are the people I've worked with. The team I've worked with has a fantastic mix of experience, knowledge and talent and it feels like all of us continuously learn new things from each other which is a situation I can only recommend to every developer.

Another great part about being independent is that you're free to do extra things on the side as well. I'm very happy with the responses that I've gotten from the people who've taken my NHibernate course, and I'm going to continue to offer it in 2012. I initially thought it would be something I'd do once or twice, but I was able to do the course 4 times this year: 1 public and 3 private ones. I've got another private one scheduled in February and will organize another public course in 2012, though this time I'm taking care of the whole thing myself instead of working with another company to organize it.

The most important thing I've learned from this first year is that it's important not to try to do too much. The first 6 months of 2011 were way too busy and hectic, and I only spent one full day doing absolutely nothing work-related. I've been taking things much slower since July and I'm spending much more time enjoying other things in life outside of work. For 2012, my biggest priority is pacing myself much better and spreading things out more. I always seem to alternate between months where I'm always working on something, followed by months of doing as little as possible outside of the 40 hours a week I do for my client. Hopefully, I can finally find a maintainable balance between those two extremes in 2012

On the blogging front, 2011 was a different year than the previous ones on this blog. In the previous years, I averaged about 150 posts a year but this year I only published 71 posts. And I'm actually happy about that. In fact, I hope to get that number down to 50 next year. I still like writing posts, but I no longer feel the need to like I did in the past while I was trying to build a bit of an audience. That often meant pushing myself to keep publishing new posts. Nowadays, I'll only write a post if I really feel like it, which in the long run is much more sustainable anyway. As far as topics covered this year, things have changed quite a bit as well. Some of my views, opinions and technical preferences have changed this year, which naturally reflects in the content I've published. I'm sure I've lost some readers this year because of it, but I also seem to have gained a lot more readers than I've lost. I don't know yet what I'll be writing about in 2012, but I will continue to push people to learn new things (or old things that people seem to forget about) and do better like I always have on this blog, in my own unique way of course

I hope you all enjoyed Christmas, and I wish you all a happy 2012. If it does turn out to be our last year on this planet, we might as well make it count.

About a year and a half ago, i had a short post about the increasing userbase of Chrome. It included the following graph:

I was interested to see how browser usage amongst us (geeks) has evolved since then. In the original post, i mentioned that i still used Firefox at home (where it's a surprisingly critical tool for most of us geeks) but had started using Chrome at work. These days i don't have the patience to wait for Firefox to start, so i'm using Chrome both at home and at work. Not only because of speed and just an overall nicer user experience (IMO), but also because it wastes a lot less memory than Firefox (a pet peeve of mine).

So i quickly gathered the numbers of your visits to this blog between February 2010 and June 2011 to see how it was evolving. Obviously, it's a relatively small sample since i'm only averaging a little over 1000 views a day in that period, but it's not exactly insignificant either.

The colors for each browser remained the same, so it's easy to compare with the previous image. While i no longer use Firefox myself, i was surprised to see its market share (at least among my readers) drop from 70% to slightly over 30% in less than 3 years. That is quite a drop, though i do expect the majority of tech-related sites/blogs to have similar drops in their Firefox stats because i can't really think of a reason why my readers would differ significantly statistically in browser usage from most other tech-related blogs/sites. Meanwhile, we notice that IE is doing a remarkable impersonation of Microsoft's stock value.

Did you change browsers in the past year/months? If so, what switch did you make, and why? In my case: faster startup time, better experience and less memory usage made me switch from Firefox to Chrome. How about you? Also, with Microsoft's renewed focus on the browser, how likely are you to switch to IE9 or IE10? I don't use IE9 because i didn't like the UI, but have to admit that i haven't really given it a fair chance. The fact that i hardly use Windows at home obviously doesn't help either . And what are your thoughts on Firefox turning things around? I don't really like their odds, though i hope things remain largely competitive over the next few years.

Btw, anyone know when Resharper 6 final is coming out?