10 Years Of Blogging

Back on January 22, 2010, I started this blog - time sure flies when you are having fun! I didn’t even join college back then, and I already wanted to share the little knowledge and tips I had with the world. Ubuntu Karmic Koala was recently released, and I was fiddling with it overwriting my MBR, ruining my n-th Windows 7 installation. Back then, my dream was to one day work at Microsoft - a pretty far shot from someone coming from the part of the world I’m from. And yet - here I am, ten years later!

In the past 10 years, I wrote 168 blog posts, which roughly translates to 131,119 words. If I wrote a book in 12pt Arial, that would be around 290 pages - a whole book, that took a decade to put together. Since 2010, I’ve moved away from WordPress on a slow, shared hosting service to a speedy static site, built with Hugo and GitHub Pages.

Why blog? #

Pure and simple - I love written communication. I like to think that since the day I started my first blog post, I both improved my English, as well as managed to frame my thoughts in a much more concise, yet actionable, manner. Blogging also helped me capture an informal knowledge base, that I refer to once in a while. For example, the article on configuring an EdgeRouter device as a level 2 switch saved me multiple times over the past couple of years when I moved apartments and had to reset the networking equipment. With some posts, I seemed to strike a chord with an audience I did not know existed - did you know there are a whole bunch of people who want to record their own Nest cam footage locally without shelling out for a subscription (just like myself)?

The blog also helped me land my first opportunity with Coding4Fun - Clint Rutkas and Dan Fernandez noticed my work with Zune APIs, and have recruited me to help them with the Coding4Fun efforts. I spent a month building a demo project, that later opened an opportunity for an internship at Microsoft, which turned into a full-time offer. All from a blog post that I debated on even publishing.

And of course, with a personal blog I like to think that I maintain a sense of ownership of my content - networks and hosting places came and went, but my blog survived (it just underwent a domain and CMS change).

What’s next? #

I plan to continue expanding my online presence through my blog. I love the fact that I can do whatever I want with the layout, keep it clean and provide my friends and readers with content unencumbered by ads and irrelevant material. I also do not plan on enabling comments on this blog. Ever. It distracts from the content, and in 99% of cases is unnecessary.

In the next ten years, I hope to improve my writing even more, and hopefully use this blog to replace my social network activity entirely. More long-form writing, less status updates.