One year anniversary

Amusingly, I see that today (Jan 9) is the one year anniversary of the start of this blog. In that time, I've done a grand total of 13 posts, making for an average of one per month. While I'm still doing better than some people, I'll make a new year's resolution to do a little better this year. :)

Thinking back over this year, a lot has changed. When I started this blog, I didn't really know what to expect. I'm not the kind of person who can just dump the thoughts in their head out and move on. I'm certainly not the kind of person who enjoys sharing the minutiae of their day with the world. As a general rule, I seriously doubt whether anyone cares what movie I saw last night, or what album I'm listening to right now or where I went on vacation last month. No offense to the folks who do write like this -- it's just not me.   

The landscape of Microsoft blogs at the time was primarily developer-oriented (Scoble not withstanding) with most Microsoft bloggers posting from gotdotnet.com and talking about new C#, Avalon and Visual Studio features. I was convinced for a long time that it would be very difficult for me to find anything to write about.

For one thing, all the features I was working on would ship in Longhorn -- which, even at the time, was a year or two away. One thing I would not do is talk about features that we had not announced yet. Aside from making my management upset, it's just a bad practice, because, as the changes in the Longhorn product have shown, until a piece of software ships, every feature is maleable. So, I would rather not talk about something and get people excited until I know for certain that it's real.

So, with all my work targeted for Longhorn, what could I talk about? Well, Service Pack 2 certainly helped. Around the time I started writing this blog, we began to push very heavily on the wireless updates. That meant that within a short period of time, there were new features out there that I could talk about. In fact, I put off starting the blog until after the first SP2 beta (I first started playing with the idea of blogging about 6 months before that).

During the year, I began experimenting with random posts about topics that were on my mind or about our experiences during development, and while I have no idea whether or not anyone really reads them or cares, I've personally enjoyed them very much.

So, in the next year, expect some more pontification as well as some pointers to the things that interest me or catch my eye.

Thanks for reading, and Happy New Year :)

Sean

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 09, 2005
  Technically, that's 1 and 1/12 posts per month. ;)
  
• Anonymous
  January 09, 2005
  I mean this in the most positive, supportive way: don't tell us, show us. Don't post about how you're going to post more often, just post more often :)
• Anonymous
  January 10, 2005
  Point very well taken, Aaron. :) I will endeavor to "walk the talk."