I’ve done my best to resist celebrating arbitrary milestones in this blog. I silently hit my 100th post a while back, as well as various fractions of a year. However, you’ll have to excuse my pride now as The Quixotic Engineer is one year old today.
For the curious, here’s a chart of my RSS subscription growth over the last year. The first big peak was the day my Gmail spam post was linked by Lifehacker, and the count has been steadily growing ever since. The occasional sharp valleys are days when Google Reader didn’t publish a subscriber count.
Writing this blog has been rewarding in ways that I really did not expect. The most obvious benefit is that my writing ability has significantly improved through frequent practice. I’ve also had a chance to learn a great deal about web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XHTML and feed syndication (RSS.) Furthermore, I’ve worked with some great open source applications, such as GIMP, Audacity, and WordPress.
More importantly, I’ve had a chance to get to know some really interesting people. Blogging is largely a social activity, and I think that getting to know fellow bloggers with similar interests is the best part. Many thanks to Michael, Nav, Leigh, Mitch, Dan, Ben, Corvus, Daniel, Dave and Tim for all the stimulating and thoughtful conversations and debates.
Thank you to all my other (quieter) readers as well. It’s very edifying when someone likes your writing enough to stick around. I’ll do my best to keep writing quality posts in the future. One year down, here’s to many many more!
