I missed the exact date by a few days, but ten years ago I wrote my first post here.

It doesn’t feel like I wrote that much in that time, but it’s actually almost 50 posts (this one is number 46).

Realizing that I’ve been running this site for a decade made me think about the time before that…how I ended up from “I’m a helpdesk guy starting to learn software development” (2002) to “I’m now writing a blog about software development” (2012):

• 2002: Got started writing MS Access/VBA code (and for the first few years, I was a Dark Matter developer)
• 2007: Started learning .NET (and ASP.NET WebForms), had to google a lot, found that there are many developers writing blogs about software development, and started reading all of them
• 2008: Discovered Stack Overflow when it was brand new (my user id has only 4 digits) and realized that there’s still a lot that I don’t know.
  • At the time I was participating in some German-speaking discussion forums about software development, but decided to focus on Stack Overflow to improve my English
• 2011: Made my first commit in my first open source project (it’s on GitHub now, but at that time it was a Mercurial repo on Bitbucket, even before Bitbucket added support for Git)
• 2012: As already mentioned above, created this site (in WordPress, back then) and wrote the first post here