A DECADE of writing on this blog

This year I'm fortunate to be celebrating a few 10th anniversaries.

One of the big ones is that this blog is officially 10 years old! This post is the 1285th post I've written on here, and I still love this part of myself.

I've written about how it's helped me as someone neurodiverse, some reasons about why I think you should blog and reflecting on hitting 1000 posts (which is even more wild that was 2 years ago!! I swore it was more recent than that), and I've definitely got a number of other posts in there about the benefits.

It all started 10 years ago, where I remember sitting downstairs in "the Software Studio" at Capital One, trying to desperately finish off what would be the first of many blog posts.

In my memory, I felt like I was slightly taking the piss, because my lunch break was a lot longer than it should have been, which considering I was just over one month into my first job, wasn't the best look, but "I needed to get it finished". But looking back at the history, I posted it at 1050, which means I hadn't even had my lunch break and I was already trying to finish the post, which is an even worse look in retrospect 🫠

That post was celebrating the start of Hacktoberfest, which I wanted to land on the first day of Hacktoberfest, so I could share it around Hacksoc Nottingham, as I would be doing a workshop about Git + Open Source later that week.

In 2016, I had basically nothing on my site - it was more of a portfolio site with some of the projects I've worked on, and this one blog post - so the traffic to my site was understandably pretty low.

It wasn't until early 2017 that I started getting some real traffic, with my blog post about why you should use GitLab.com, as a big fan of the platform, which alongside using GitLab CI and Capistrano, I ended up seeing a lot more traffic.

Later that year, I put some words to Blogumentation - Writing Blog Posts as a Method of Documentation, which would become a staple of my website, accounting for 557 posts (~43%) on my site.

Looking back, I had no idea what the next 10 years would have in store for me. It's been a whirlwind, it's been glacial, and it's been much more public than maybe I would've thought this decade of my life would have been - but I don't think I'd change anything. This blog has had untold benefit to me as a person and to my career, and having the platform to do things like sharing my salary publicly has been such a positive in of itself.

I've had my website since as early as 2011-06-22, where I used jamietanna.co.uk as my main URL, and used it to do web design as a side gig. As I think I've said before, I moved onto jvt.me at some point later - maybe 2016, according to the Internet Archive - primarily so I could provide a short URL to folks, but then ended up liking it enough to stick with it, and it's been a documented part of my identity for some time, to the point of ridicule.

This is a little bit more stream-of-consciousness than some of my other posts, and I don't know how much more I want to pour out in the world about this - maybe it's best to keep this one a bit shorter?

Considering this anniversary, I'll try and give my old posts a re-read. I do find it a little bit jarring reading how I used to write, what used to be important to me (especially if you look back at the start of my Week Notes, which started just as COVID19 starts to loom across the world), and how devoid of context some of my posts were (due to requirements of $job).

You're recommended to hit some of the greatest hits, too, or peruse the very long list on /archives - or not at all. It's a free Internet.

Here's to another decade 🥂