A Year of Blogging

Tuesday will mark one year since I made my first post on this blog. I don’t normally do a lot of nontechnical posts, but this will be one of the exceptions.

The Build Up

Over the years I had heard numerous people such as Scott Hanselman  and Cory House recommend blogging and community involvement in general. As I mentioned in this post I have been making an effort to be move involved with the community in the Nashville area over the last couple of years, but had up until this point ignored the advice to start a blog.

This started to change when I read John Sonmez’s book Soft Skills. John’s book really started make me feel the push to create content not just consume it. After reading Soft Skills I signed up for John’s free blogging course which I read, but didn’t take action on. After the course was done John continued to send the occasional blog related email one of which I finally got me to take action.

The Beginning

My first challenge was deciding on a topic area to focus on and I decided to go with ASP.NET. My first post LocalDB v11.0 or MSSQLLocalDB came from an issue I faced when trying to get started with ASP.NET. I remember pushing publish on that first post and being worried about people might say or what mistake I might have made that someone would use rip me to pieces.

What actually happen was nothing. The first few months I basically got no traffic. I had told almost no one about this blog and was not doing post notifications to Twitter.

ASP.NET 5

As I got more in to the world of ASP.NET I came across the beta releases of ASP.NET 5 (now ASP.NET Core) and this became the source of a lot of my entries. I really enjoyed doing entries that provided a guide from one beta to the next. The migration entries are also when I started to feel that I was providing some value to the community.

Exploration of ASP.NET 5 lead me to try Aurelia and Angular 2. This also lead to some exploration of gulp, systemjs, jspm, etc. There is so much to learn, but that is the great thing about being in software.

The Next Year

I am excited to see what the next year brings. ASP.NET Core will hopefully get updated release dates soon and along with that will come the .NET CLI. Both Aurelia and Angular 2 are moving forward toward release. There is never a shortage of things to learn!

If anyone has an topics they would like to see covered drop me a comment. Thanks for all the support over the last year!