Keyvan Nayyeri

Five years is not a short while that you can ignore and some old readers may be surprised if I say that my blog is turning five today! I started blogging here on 28 June 2005 and have been doing that for five years. It may be interesting to go back and read my anniversary posts for 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009. At least, they were very interesting for myself!

Such an age for a blog is a sign of maturity and I think that I can easily assert that my blog has become mature enough in the past five years. There have been many changes both in my life and on this blog that have made it very different from the early days both in regards to look and feel and the content.

To have a quick overview of the past five years, I have to say that I started blogging with focusing on republishing the news and technical stuff in the first year, then started to write technical posts, articles, and tutorials about the current trends on the .NET community in the second year. Starting in the third year, I was writing content about new technologies that were mostly in early stages of development and my content became one of the most influential resources about those technologies. Since then I started to have a leading role on the community as well.

The past year was very different in several ways. First, I had the lowest number of blog posts which comes from a few facts that I explain later. Second, I moved to the United States and started my Ph.D. program in Computer Science with new concerns. Third, I engaged more in technical talks and presentations that were eating my time for blogging. Fourth, I recently resigned from the Microsoft community to spend my time and effort on greater good.

All these factors affected this blog and changed it a lot. My posts were mostly about more advanced stuff and I started to publish content about academic and non-Microsoft technologies. For the first time I wrote about advanced Software Engineering concepts, iPhone programming, and Scala that widened the audience of this blog to some extent.

Unlike the past few years, I only have a few major hits for this year:

• Migrated to Behistun with a fresh new theme (September 19, 2009): After over four years and using two Telligent products, Community Server and Graffiti CMS, I finally made the move by writing my own blog engine with ASP.NET MVC and reloaded my blog with a fresh and simple template.
• Left Iran and came to the US (December 11, 2009): In early December 2009 I left Iran to come here to the United States to pursue my Doctorate degree in Computer Science. Obviously, this was a big change that affected my blog as well.
• Resigned from the .NET community (May 17, 2010): Having several reasons outlined, I made my mind to leave the .NET community and find my future in better places because I couldn’t see any good future for that community. What I’ve witnessed in this short while has proven me to be true. This was an important change because a big portion of my past blog posts were about Microsoft technologies.

As of the reasons for my lower blogging activity, I’d say that my interests are changed over time and I don’t have such a burning passion for blogging anymore. I have great memories from blogging here in the past but blogging doesn’t seem to be very exciting anymore. Besides, Twitter has replaced blogging in many cases and I spend more time publishing quick content over there. Additionally, I’d love to publish more noble content about more advanced stuff and develop those ideas, so I prefer to focus more on them even if there are quite a few posts published per month.

All in all, less or more I’d expect to have the same level of blogging activity over the next year as well. Many of the blogs that were alive back in 2005 are either dead or have the same activity as mine. It’s a great feeling to be able to maintain a blog within five sensitive years of your life under very difficult circumstances varying from my undergraduate studies to my military service, and now my Doctorate studies.

In the end, I have to thank all my old and new readers for following this blog and helping me with their feedback.