One year of blogging

One year ago (24th of Mars) I wrote my first blog post . This first birthday is just one of three jubilees  I celebrated the last months, I became a member of the gold club , I celebrated my sixtieth birthday and now one year as a blogger. In the light of the other jubilees one year as a blogger is maybe not so much write about.

When I started blogging my intention was to learn and understand what blogging was all about, and this has really been a learning experience. First thing I learned ‘It takes longer time to write posts than I anticipated’. I chose to write about my professional life which the last years have been concentrated around Business Intelligence and extracting data from mainly SAP ERP systems into my Data Warehouse application. Consequently most posts are about those topics. It’s not just to write, you have to test and verify what you write is correct and that is time consuming. Still when I reread post I find errors, it is no easy task to write IT technical articles. I think we all have seen examples that do not work, not even compile. A colleague wrote to me the other day ‘You have a syntax error on line 1...’. You have to pay attention to the most minute details, and that is not something I’m good at, I am a bit offhand and absent-minded (in extreme some would say), and that is not good qualities when writing IT-technical stuff. I have written 69 posts during this year, I think this is impressive since this is no twitter posts (some of them took more than a full day to write).

Another thing I learned and that was as expected, it’s fun to write posts, but I like to write i think this as a prerequisite for blogging. One very surprising and extremely positive finding, blog posts are very suitable for general documentation of applications and programs. I find myself going back to examples in my blog when I forgot a detail.

If you publish you want readers, even if my purpose was not to reach out or market myself I  became more or less obsessed with statistics, I still check every day (more than once) how many are visiting my blog, the number is growing, January was all time high, 556 visits.

Of course you want feedback, but I was not expecting any, and I was more or less right. So far I got one positive feedback, (for which I’m very proud of and very thankful). I got one troll, one who wanted to sell/market a software product and a prank (from a colleague) and that’s all.

I will probably continue to blog, it’s a nice way of document interesting parts of my daily work. I will take on a new mission in short future. and I do not know yet to what extent that mission will lend itself to blog posts. Anyway that I will write a post about when time is due.