It seems like it was yesterday since Gigi Labs was launched, and yet, that happened three years ago today.
In the past year, a lot of new articles were added, and there are now over 200 articles in this site. I’ve added pages under the Writings section for each of the more important series. In there, you’ll now find the progress of the Programmer’s Ranch migration, as well as two highly successful series launched this year: The Sorry State of the Web, and C# Asynchronous Programming.
The Sorry State of the Web started as a result of my frustration with so-called professional websites, including major US airlines. In time I ran into so many issues that I published one or two articles a month for six months. While this was entertaining sport, the web didn’t get any better as a result, and I figured I could use my time more wisely elsewhere. For instance, by writing high-quality articles to help people write good software.
And so, this month, I decided to write about C# Asynchronous Programming. I observed over the years that this was a topic that .NET developers found particularly difficult to grasp, and I decided to put in writing what I had been explaining over and over again to different people. While there was too much to say for a single article, the series that resulted from this effort was phenomenally successful. In fact, this month has been Gigi Labs’ best month ever in terms of traffic, by a huge stretch.
Other articles of note in the past year include my article On Daily Standups (which, as I expected, was quite controversial), various articles on Mirosoft Orleans (including those on Persistence, parts of which were contributed to the official Microsoft Orleans documentation), and articles on .NET Core / .NET Standard which helped to alleviate a lot of the confusion that many people had with what is now a family of frameworks.
In the meantime, I have removed the page that served as a quick reference to interest rates offered by Maltese banks. Since I had no more time to maintain this anyway, removing it helped Gigi Labs keep its focus.
I wish I could give some kind of idea of what’s in store for Gigi Labs in the coming year, but the truth is that I don’t know. For one thing, I would like to get back to game development – both because that is where my heart has always been, and because I feel that making games is really the best way to teach a lot of programming concepts. But I’m not making promises at this stage – we’ll see how things play out (pun not intended) in the coming months.
Once again, thanks for your support over the past 3 years!