Community

Five Years of Blogging

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Today is the fifth anniversary of my first post on this site. As I do every year at this time this post is going to be a look back over the last year as it related to this blog plus some overall information since the five year mark is a big one.

Positives from Blogging

Most of my positive points are the same over the years.

  • Drives my personal learning
  • Opportunity to try technology outside of my day job
  • Helping you all learn new things and/or overcome problems
  • Comments from you all when you find something useful

Challenges from Blogging

Most of the challenges are the same year over year as well.

  • Learning on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to post consistently
  • Focusing too much on results (stats, comments, etc.)
    • Much harder this year since the growth of the site has slowed
  • Picking the right topics
  • Time requirements

Top posts of the last year

Top post from the last five years

The next year

This year we have .NET 5 to look forward to which should bring with it client-side Blazor. I haven’t heard much about what else will be in .NET 5, but I’m sure it will be some exciting stuff.

Random Status from the last 5 years

264 posts (meeting the goal of one post per week)
664 comments
1,158,797 spam comments blocked by Akismet
2 hosting companies (Nodehost rocks!)
101 books read (last 3 years)
6 books purchased from referral links
Peek page views in July 2018
Peek yearly page views in 2019

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Back at it

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Hopefully, you all haven’t noticed, but over the last few weeks, I have been out of my normal routine due to some medical issues with multiple family members. Don’t worry everyone is now fine, or well on the way to fine. While my wife doesn’t actually read this blog I still want to call her out for being amazing. She is one of the family members who had an issue and I took some time off to take care of our son while she was recovering and her job is so much harder than what I do every day.

Back to blog related items. The reason you all haven’t noticed that I haven’t been around is that I keep about 4 posts ahead. This is a rule I set for myself years ago. If you are running a blog where you are trying to post on a schedule I highly recommend that you get ahead of your schedule. Getting ahead of my schedule is the only way that I have kept my stress level low enough to continue the blog at all. Since I have been out for a while my number of posts ready to go has gotten way too low and I have been struggling to get back into my normal routine.

I know this post isn’t going to be interesting to most people, but this is going to be a small win that gets things flowing again. Thank you for sticking with me and stay tuned the normal post will return next week.

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Four Years of Blogging

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Monday will be the fourth anniversary of my first post on this blog. If you have been around for a while this post is going to be very similar to the one from last year.

Positives

Most of my positive points are the same as last year, but here they are again in case you are new this year.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping others learn new concepts
  • Helping others overcome problems
  • Comments from readers letting me know posts were helpful
  • No big hosting issues this year (thank you NodeHost!)

Challenges

Suprise some of the challenges are the same too. The big new one this year is negative responses/comments to some of my posts which has actually been much worse for me to come to terms with than the rest of the challenges I have faced.

  • Negative responses/comments (See this post an example)
  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week (increasing my stress level)
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Time requirements taking away from other projects I would like to do

Top posts of the year

I had two repeats this year and the rest are new to the top 5. It is a bit surprising that a post with Angular 2 in the title is still making the top 5.

Resources

ASP.NET Weekly is a weekly digest of all the best ASP.NET related news and blog post run by Jerrie Pelser.

ASP.NET Community Standup is straight from the team at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET Core. These videos are a great way to get the scoop on what is in the works.

NodeHost is my hosting provider. They provide super simple and cheap hosting. If you are looking for a place to host your own blog check them out. Combine them with Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt and you are all set if you are going to WordPress route.

See my Books, Podcasts and Other Resources post for a more complete list.

The next year

This coming year is going to be a good one with the continued previews and eventual release of .NET Core 3 and related ASP.NET Core 3, Entity Framework Core 3, and support for Winforms/WPF.

I am also open to topic suggestions. Use the comments on this post or drop me an email and I will see what I can do.

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Back from Disney World

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Today is my first day back from being at Disney World for a week with my family. We had a wonderful time. It was awesome to see our 6-year-old light up seeing all the sights and ride for the first time.

This trip was also the first full week of vacation I have had in years. There was a lot going on at work and I found it really hard to unplug. I can’t tell you how many times I checked my email and Teams while waiting in line for one thing or another. I’m sure this amounted to less than 1% of the time I was off, but I feel like even that level of work is more than enough to lose some of the mental recoveries that vacation should provide.

Future Strategies

I think the biggest thing I could do in the future is different timing. This trip ended up being during a client go live which greatly added to the feeling that I needed to stay connected in case something went wrong.

Second, I need to take more time to ensure I’m not the single point of knowledge on any subject. The one thing I did end up having to do was because I forgot to convey some information on how our QA team was running a service.

Third, I just need to take more time off. As I said above this is the first time in years that I have taken a full week off. This has been due to family medical issues and it has gotten me in the habit of saving all the time off I can to cover times I need to be out to help out the family. Now that things have calmed down I am going to have to adjust to being able to have time off and disconnecting.

Wrapping Up

I’m still in the process of getting back into the swing of things and this topic was on my mind. I would love to hear how you all deal with this issue.

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Three Years of Blogging

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This Thursday will be the third anniversary of my first post to this blog. This post is going to be similar to the post I did last year in the form of a retrospective.

Positives

Most of my positive points are the same as last year. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as these are the reasons I spend my free time working on the blog.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping others learn new concepts
  • Helping others overcome problems
  • Made my first contributions to open source
  • Comments from readers letting me know posts were helpful
  • No big hosting issues this year (thank you NodeHost!)

Challenges

Again most of the challenges are in line with what they were last year. I guess I should take that as a red flag and focus on solving some of my challenges instead of living with them.

  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week (increasing my stress level)
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Time requirements taking away from other projects I would like to do

Top posts of the year

I was a little surprised at the makeup of this list. I expected to have more than a single repeat from last year’s list.

I did a series of posts looking at Identity Server 4 this year that didn’t make the above list individual, but as a total, the series was huge for me last year. If you are interested you can check out all the posts here.

Resources

There are a couple of resources that I want to point out.

ASP.NET Weekly is a weekly digest of all the best ASP.NET related news and blog post run by Jerrie Pelser. Jerrie does a lot of good work in addition to ASP.NET Weekly including a blog and a book.

ASP.NET Community Standup is straight from the team at Microsoft who is responsible for ASP.NET Core. These videos are a great way to get the scoop on what is in the works. Also, note that if you have watched in the past this show has moved from Scott Hanselman’s YouTube channel to .NET Foundation’s channel so update your subscriptions.

John Sonmez’s free blogging course is what finally pushed me over the edge to start blogging. It is a great resource to help get you moving.

NodeHost is my hosting provider. They provide super simple and cheap hosting. If you are looking for a place to host your own blog check them out. Combine them with Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt and you are all set if you are going to WordPress route.

The next year

As usual, I am looking forward to seeing where ASP.NET Core goes next. Things like SignalR Core, HttpClientFactory, Entity Framework Core improvements are going to be great to explore.

Outside of ASP.NET Core, I am looking at putting out a very basic Xamiran app. Based how that goes you may see a few posts related to Xamiran in the next year.

If there is a topic you would like to see covered leave me a comment and I will add it to my list of things to look at.

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Hitting a wall

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I have had a very frustrating week. I got sick, failure on two different blog posts, basically no progress on any project. I hit walls on everything I attempted.

Everyone has bad weeks and if you look back I am sure you will find I have made a couple of posts along these same lines. I don’t post this type stuff to complain, but instead to be clear that this isn’t easy and at times is a struggle. I share this so that it can be an encouragement when you hit your own walls. Everyone faces struggles. Pick your hero and I can promise that they struggle.

We tend to see only the positives from the lives of other people which makes what we are going through feel worse and unfair. Comparing the full depth of yourself to the public face of others is an easy way to head down a very negative path. A path I have struggled with at times.

If you struggle with some of the same things I recommend that you check out the content of John Sonmez and Gary Vaynerchuk. Both of them have helped me push through some of the walls I have hit. The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon has also been helpful for staying positive.

Whatever wall you are hitting keep working and push through. You can do this.

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Two Years of Blogging

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Wednesday will mark two years for this blog. This post is going to be a bit of a retrospective on my blogging journey so far.

Positives

A number of positive things have come out of maintaining this blog some of them I expected other were surprises.

  • Driver for learning new things
  • Opportunity to use new/different technology outside of my normal work
  • Helping people learn a new concept or get past a sticking point
  • New connections with people outside of my normal circles
  • Improvements to my written communication skills
  • Improvements in picking up new technology

Challenges

In addition to the above, the following is a list of things that challenged me. Some of them have helped me grow and others continue to give me problems.

  • Learning new things on a deadline
  • Self-applied pressure to meet my goal of a post a week
  • Not focusing on stats, shares, comment, etc.
  • Picking the right things to learn
  • Losing focus

Hosting challenges

I hit quite a few issues with my host this year. The biggest being multiple multi-day downtimes, high site load times, and difficult to implement SSL support.

In an attempt to address the second two problems I started using Cloudflare which worked well, but the lack of SSL support from my host cause some quirky issues.

All this led to me switching to NodeHost last month. That is a referral link that will give you a $5 credit when you sign up. NodeHost does all their hosting on SSDs and has built-in support for Let’s Encrypt which took care of my SSL problems. Getting a site setup initially was harder that on my old host, but it was totally worth the switch and ended up costing less.

Even with the hosting change I still recommend using Cloudflare. By using Cloudflare my host is having to handle around 50% few requests thanks to Cloudflare’s caching.

Top post of the year

It is interesting to look back and see which post have done the best over time. It is surprising to me that my first post is still in the top 5 post for the last year. One of my top posts was featured on ASP.NET community spotlight which always pushes way more traffic.

The next year

From where it stands now I see more than enough things in the ASP.NET Core/Aurelia/Angular areas to learn and they will continue to be my focus over the next year. I am especially excited that ASP.NET Core tooling to be complete and for Visual Studio 2017 to be released this year. I am also really looking forward to the .NET Standard 2 support to be released. With those two items taken care of, I will feel completely comfortable recommending ASP.NET Core it a much wider range of scenarios.

As always I am open to topic suggestions for topics and happy to answer questions. Thank you for the support of the last couple of years.

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Conference Retro

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The last few weeks have been extremely busy for me. I had the pleasure of attending both Code on the Beach and Music City Code over the last couple of weekends.

Code on the Beach

My employer was very kind and sent my whole team to Jacksonville, FL for this event. One of the neat thing about this event is that is fairly small number of attendees. There were less than 300 or so people present. The speakers were awesome with surprising number of them who speak on a national level. Just to name a few I got to see Scott Hunter, Jon Galloway, Jeff Fritz, Kathleen Dollard, Stacey Mulcahy and David Neal.

I have not been to a ton of conferences, but Code on the Beach had the best schedule I have seen by far. There were four sessions to choose from in each time slot and the number of time slots didn’t exceed six. For me this was great as it didn’t overload me with choices. There was also couple hour break in the middle of the day for lunch and a little beach time. The break really help give my brain a rest and made it easier to stay engaged for the afternoon sessions.

If you can work it out I highly recommend getting your whole team out of town for a conference. I feel like the team getting to spend time with each other outside of our normal environments was a huge benefit. The team building aspects this trip were well worth the cost.

Music City Code

This year was Music City Code’s (MCC) second year and it takes place in my home area of Nashville, TN. The event has expanded a lot since last year going from a single day event to three days and from 250 attendees to 500. Since this event is only in its second year I was expecting to see mostly speakers from the areas around Nashville, but the speaker pool was much more diverse than I was expecting. Some of the people I got to see speak include Christina Aldan, Heather Wilde, David Neal, Jeremy Clark, Joel Tosi, Paul Jones, and Scott Drake.

MCC had a schedule more like I was used to with a lot of choices per time slot. The downside of that of course is that a lot of times I wanted to be in multiple places at once. One of the really neat things about this conference is during lunch they have a band playing and want attendees to get on stage and play or sing with the band.

This was something I choose to attend myself and only one other person from my company was there. Since I was not there with a team I met more people than I would have otherwise. I know above I recommend going to a conference with your teams, but I am also going to recommend going to a conference without your team in order to get to know people you wouldn’t be interacting with if you were surrounded by your teammates.

Positives

Conferences have tons of positives. Leaning about new technology is a lot of peoples top reason for attending and it is a great benefit, but not the top one in my option. For me the best part is the interactions with my teammates and people from the broader community. Not only does the interactions with people open the door to new friendships, but it also means getting to hear about the gritty parts of actual implementations of different technology. That is not to say that speakers only tell you about the good parts, but talks have time restrictions and don’t leave enough time to cover all the potholes a particular technology has.

Exhaustion

As great as both conferences were I am happy to have a weekend back with my family. Two weekends away from them was hard. I am not used to travelling which that added to my exhaustion. I have more empathy for how much of a challenge it is for people who are required to travel a lot.

Thank You

I am going to end this post with an open thank you to conference organizers, speakers, volunteers and attendees. Without every ones time and effort great events like Code on the Beach and Music City Code would not happen.

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Community

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This is a departure from the types of post I normally do so please bear with me.

Early in my career I followed some bad advice that steered me away from the great development community that Nashville has to offer. Following that advice is the thing I regret most in my career. That advice is what lead me down the path of the dark matter developer that I mention in the about page for this site.

I spent a lot of years working very hard at my job with my only interaction with other developers being my co-workers. It was comfortable and the easy thing to do. I did not realize how much I was limiting myself. Limiting my growth as a developer, but more so limiting my personal development.

Thankfully this is not where the story ends. A lot of life happened and I ended up being exposed to a group of people who loved being involved with the Nashville development community. They were excited by what they do and involved at levels I had never seen. It was a breath of fresh air and a turning point for me. I am a shy and introverted person but exposure to the community helped me to start getting passed my shyness.

To start I began attending the local .Net User Group. For me this user group was a great place to start. I could listen to the speaker and slip out after the talk was over without too much interaction with others. Over time interactions got easier and I met a ton of great people. User groups are a great for learning new things, but I have come to realize that the connections made with other people are by far the most valuable benefit. I have even expanded to some social only events like the Geek Social.

If you are not involved with the community in your area I encourage you to start. Get to know your fellow developers. They are the greatest resource to be found.

If you need more convincing check out this content from Scott Hanselman and Rob Conery.

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