Yet Another 2009 Year In Review

About this time last year I decided that I wanted to make 2009 the year that I really got more involved in the .NET community and started giving back. Here are the goals I had last December (and a few I picked up a long the way) and what ended up happening:

Goal: 52 Blog Posts

I didn’t get there. This post is #43 for the year, which isn’t bad. I had a lot more I wanted to blog about but just didn’t find the time. I’m not sure what my goal for 2010 is going to be. Here are the numbers (with 2008):

Pageviews: 104,088 (89,539)
Feedburner Subscribers: ~420 (~130, biggest jump explained here)
Top Posts:

Self-proclaimed ‘best’ posts, in no particular order:

My popular posts from pre-2009 continued to be popular (in particular Slightly more dynamic ORDER BY in SQL Server 2005 and .NET Cheat Sheet: ASP.NET 2.0 Page Life Cycle & Common Events, both from 2007) and the .NET Cheat Sheets continued to be the most popular page on the blog while also bringing in the most traffic from search engines.

While I didn’t meet my post number goal, overall it was a successful year for the blog.

Goal: Give 1 Technical Presentation

The best way to learn something is to teach it so I set a goal of giving one technical presentation in 2009. Why just one? Well, I want to be a coder who occasionally speaks instead of vice-versa. I also only want to speak about things I’m building or built (to keep the talks practical) and I don’t kick out enough things to be speaking all the time. I ended up doing 1 1/2 talks.

While at the jQuery conference I decided to do an open spaces talk on using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC since MVC wasn’t being represented as well as I hoped it would. I demo’d the .NET Twitter Stream to a room of about 15 people. I think it went well.

I also was fortunate enough to have a chance to talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group. While working on this talk, RestSharp was born. You can read more about my experience and watch the recording.

I enjoyed giving both talks and I hope to do a few more in 2010. I’ve submitted an abstract for MIX and will try to do more local events like code camps and barcamps.

Goal: Start 1 Open Source Project

I use so many OSS projects that I really wanted to find a way to contribute back to the ecosystem. My first attempt was a library for reversing short URLs, which led me down a road that involved working with a lot of REST APIs. Not wanting to have to write parsers for all of them, I started kicking around the idea of a SubSonic-like project for REST APIs. I was also looking for a topic for the aforementioned technical presentation and things sort of just fell into place. While working on the talk, the concept for RestSharp (then called Stillwater) really took shape. A few weeks after the talk, RestSharp went live on GitHub. Progress has been steady since and a 1.0 release is nearing.

While playing with Visual Studio 2010 I tried out the new support for Javascript code snippets and was disappointed there weren’t any for jQuery, so I cranked out 130 of them and posted them on CodePlex. The project was retweeted by Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman and many, many others as well as covered on Channel 9. Thanks to everyone on Twitter and otherwise who helped spread the word!

Goal: 500 Legit Twitter Followers

First let me say the right thing: Twitter follower count doesn’t matter. That said, on January 1, 2009 I had 38 followers on Twitter. I set at the time what I thought was a ridiculous goal of 500 legit followers by the end of the year. I focused my tweets on technical content (very little personal stuff, that’s what Facebook is for), tried to tweet regularly (but not too much) and tried to provide consistent value in my tweets. My count slowly rose throughout the year. Once TweetDeck introduced groups (eventually supplanted by lists) I was able to follow many more people which also helped boost the count. I also aggressively weeded out spammers, SEO scum and other fake accounts so that the count is more legit. In early December I reached my goal of 500 and now sit at 580 (graph). I appreciate every follower and try not to waste their time. It’s really encouraging to see people only following 20 people who are mostly big names and then to see your avatar next to them.

Bonus: Build a Better Community Site

I’ve already written about why I started Managed Assembly so I won’t rehash that. The site is growing and I’m going to keep improving it in 2010 (hopefully with a redesign sooner rather than later). The site has also spun off some Twitter accounts for sharing links which are growing steadily as well.

Bonus: Win a Developer Contest

As a result of my posts on building a hotline with Twilio, I was honored to win the ‘Coordinating People’ category in the Twilio Developer Contest. I don’t use the netbook as much as I thought I would, but it was still fun to win!

Twenty ten

So what’s in store for 2010? I spent the years preceding 2009 focusing on building web apps instead of tools/resources. This year I sort of took a break from the app building to rev up my skills and get re-energized to build stuff. It’s time to put the tools to work. And that’s what I’m going to do. 2010 is going to be the year I start making some of these crazy ideas (outside of the .NET developer community) I have come to life. Of course I will keep talking about the things I learn on here and on Twitter as I go along. I can’t wait to get started!

Posted December 31st, 2009 11:59 PM
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