A lot has changed both personally and in our industry in that amount of time. I’m going to look back in wonder at the last fifteen years if I can.
I didn’t start tracking users until I added Google Analytics in 2008, but in that time I’ve reached over 1.5m users (who knows how accurate ‘unique users’ are…I’m suspect of this number). But I did just pass 3 million page views. I’m hoping most of those views helped people just a little.
My blog hasn’t always been at wildermuth.com. In fact, it’s had several names. I started with the pompous sounding ‘comguru.com’ which unfortunately I wasn’t (that is a COM guru). Soon after I realized my passion for database development and changed it to adoguy.com which stuck for a long, long time. I even got a license plate with the name. Too many many of my neighbors read it as “A Dog Guy” which I’m not. You can see the wayback machine’s earliest version of the website (which was some years after I started it) here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010419152252/http://www.comguru.com/
Through the fifteen years, I’ve been moving through quite a list of topics. Here’s a list (from memory) of the things I was passionate about at one time or another:
- Visual Basic
- COM (Component Object Model)
- ADO (Active Data Objects)
- RDO (Remote Data Objects)
- ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity)
- OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding DataBase)
- C++
- ATL (Active Template Library)
- ASP (Active Server Pages)
- dotnet
- C#
- WinForms
- ADO.NET
- .NET Remoting
- ASP.NET (Web Forms)
- Object Spaces
- WinFS (Windows File System)
- WPF (Windows Presentation Framework)
- WPF/e (Windows Presentation Framework/everywhere)
- Silverlight (WPF/e’s final name)
- WCF
- WCF Data Services (e.g. OData)
- Oslo (e.g. M, MGrammar, and MSchema)
- ASP.NET MVC
- Knockout
- Angular
- Bootstrap
- ASP.NET Core
- Docker
I’m sure I’ve missed a few too. But this tells me a lot about what kind of developer and teacher. I love to learn. And even though quite a few of these crashed and burned (i.e. Object Spaces, Oslo, and WinFS), taking the chance in learning them taught me something even in failure.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found the solution to my own question on this blog. It’s become a bit of a warehouse for things I don’t want to forget. I am so happy if it’s helped some of you too.
Thanks for being there this last decade and a half (almost).
