The Quixotic Engineer

If you’ll excuse a brief lapse into meta-blogging, I’m proud to announce that The Quixotic Engineer is two years old today! As I did last year, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on another year of writing.

This chart shows how the site’s RSS subscriptions have grown since June 2008 (according to Feedburner.) These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do illustrate that I’ve had a very fortunate year! The big spike in October came from being linked by Kotaku and the front page of Digg in the space of a week (many thanks to Maggie Greene.)

This year I wrote 41 posts, overhauled my blog design twice, and made my first two non-trivial games: Inventory Tetris and Rockwell, Papyrus, Skia. There’s more to come! I’m currently hard at work on a substantially larger secret project in pygame, and experimenting with flixel when I have a moment to spare.

More significantly, this last year saw the game blogging community really begin to gel. The conversation that started in blogs and comments moved to Twitter and the #GBConfab IRC channel, then came full circle as cross-posts, podcasts and shared experiences. The game writing archive Critical Distance was born out of this spirit of collaboration, and will hopefully serve to further expand the conversation.

In fact, the game blogging community is already so large that I do not feel that I can adequately thank everyone individually. Therefore, I’d like to thank all of you for your support, your critical insight, and your humour. I look forward to many more trips around the sun writing and learning with you all.

To all my quieter readers: thanks for sticking around, and happy Canada day!