One THOUSAND blog posts

This is my one thousandth blog post. That is absolutely wild.

I remember reading Lorna Mitchell's post about hitting 1000 blog posts a few years back, and being wowed by that, and wondering if I'd ever get there.

I've been working towards this since my first official blog post to this site, Hacktoberfest 2016. This was the first blog post on what was effectively a portfolio site to show off the projects I was working on (ahead of starting my first job at Capital One), and I'm a little gutted that I can't see the first version of the post on the Internet Archive.

Originally my site was jamietanna.co.uk, and I'd only bought jvt.me to be a URL shortener, but then one day I started using it, and it stuck.

In 2017, write blog posts as a form of blogumentation became critical to how as a (then undiagnosed) ADHD haver was able to share and remember what they'd learned, as well as make it easier for me to re-solve issues at work for colleagues by being able to share a URL rather than re-explain things.

As I've noted in Why Blog?, it's been a huge career booster for me, and has led to me being sought out for jobs, writing training courses or even technical books due to it, as well as giving me a very public way to keep note of the great things I've learnt, with the side effect of others being able to learn from my learnings, too.

It's also given me a platform to do some good, like sharing my salary publicly, and writing very openly about my ADHD and the diagnosis process, which has led to at least 6 people I know of who've got diagnosed off the back of my writing.

I first got a website after one of my Computing A-level teachers, MJS, recommended each of us in the class get our names, as it'd be something we'd find really valuable, for email and otherwise. It's amazing what an impact it has made to my career and my life in the years since I bought it in ~2010, and I don't dare to think how I'd have turned out if I didn't have this as an outlet, honestly.

I find it ironic, and a shame, that the same teacher has let their domain lapse, as have a number of friends and colleagues over the years, but I guess folks have different attachments to their URL than I do.

My blog's inspired a number of meme sites like Alex Vernacchia's surprise and surprise-2, or James King's didyouknowjamiehasawebsite.co.uk (domain unfortunately now expired), and in the communities I've been part of, there's a lot of (sarcastic) "oh I didn't know Jamie had a website", or my promotion speech at Capital One referencing my site heavily.

So of the last 1000 posts, let's do a lil' breakdown:

• 744 are regular blog posts
• 236 are Week Notes i.e. last week
• 471 are blogumentation posts
• ~dozen are from other sites I've written on
• ~dozen are semi-automated posts like my Music in Review i.e. 2023
• 70 are posts about this website (meta!)
• 25 are about dependency-management-data
• 45 are about the IndieWeb
• 31 are event writeups
• There's roughly 683000 words in there, with the longest being 15000 words
• Every single one of them was home-grown human written
• My site's .git repo is ~142M and the site has ~75000 files
• 2831 days since the first blog post, averaging 1 post every ~3 days

I've categorised a number of popular posts that are worth a read, and you may be interested in skimming through the archives, too.

Until the next milestone, I'm interested to hear how and why you're reading my blog - happy reading!