A Very Special Anniversary

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the first post on this blog. It's been a wild ride writing for here, and I never would have predicted that after all this time I'd still be doing this.

For posterity, here are a few links that show how the site itself has evolved over the intervening years, though the site itself isn't really the most important thing to celebrate today.

Really today is special because it gives me the time to reflect on what writing for this blog has taught me. Since writing the first version of this blog I went from being a college student interested in programming to being a professional and independent software developer. In many ways I have achieved what I set out to do all those years ago, though of course not in the way I originally envisioned.

Blogging has been a truly transformational hobby for me. Like many people, I write to think. The process of making something —writing in this case— helps me solidify my own opinion on a topic and putting my thoughts to words helps me consolidate and organize them in a way that no other way does.

This blog has also served as an unofficial resumé for me on several different occasions. I often tell people who are just starting out to set up a blog themselves. You don't have to build your own; you can just use Wordpress. But having a public presence filled with your own complex thoughts on a number of topics helps prospective employers understand your inner machinations. It shows them that you know how to think just like a resumé would. My blog and public Github projects have gotten me just as far (if not further) than an actual resumé.

More than that though, blogging here has given me a chance to get my thoughts out into the world. I'm incredibly fortunate that my writing is occasionally interesting to others and that a handful of my posts have gone micro-viral thanks to sites like Hacker News. To everyone who clicked on one of my posts: thank you. To all of you who actually read the post: thanks even more.

The internet continues to be a force we barely understand, but here I've gotten the chance to experiment, try things, fail, and get back up again. And I've tried to bring you all along with me as I've found out the answers to all sorts of questions.

Thank you all for reading, and here's to another ten years.


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