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10 Years of Programmer’s Ranch

Today marks the 10th anniversary since the launch of my earlier tech blog, Programmer’s Ranch, with its first article. To celebrate this occasion, I’d like to reflect on the impact of this blog.

History

Programmer’s Ranch today.

Having launched my first website back in 2002, I was writing language tutorials as early as 2003. These helped me consolidate the web technology (and, later, programming languages) I was learning, while also sharing that knowledge with others. I enjoyed this, but it’s also true that lengthy technical writing is tedious, time-consuming, and gets obsolete relatively quickly. I soon grew weary of formal language tutorials and decided to shift towards more casual articles in which I could write about any topics I found interesting at the time, without having to adhere to any particular structure.

Programmer’s Ranch was launched on 2nd May 2013, after a series of websites and blogs that preceded it, and during some very unfortunate life circumstances. Still early in my career at the time, I observed that many programming topics aren’t really as hard as they seem; it would be much easier to learn them if they were explained in a simple and clear manner. I sought to develop this idea with Programmer’s Ranch by regularly writing fun and concise articles that explained various programming and other tech concepts.

Between 2nd May 2013 and 4th October 2014 – less than a year and a half – I published 91 articles at Programmer’s Ranch. By then, it was clear that the Blogger platform wasn’t great for writing technical articles, and so I launched Gigi Labs on 24th October 2014 to continue writing on a better platform. With over 300 articles published here since then, my writing style, focus and frequency have changed over the years, but they continue to build upon the foundations and values that Programmer’s Ranch established ten years ago.

Writing Style

As I mentioned earlier, by the time I launched Programmer’s Ranch, I felt that programming didn’t need to be so hard for beginners. I was frustrated by unnecessary complexity and poor communication that led to so many obstacles to learning, even in a time when internet adoption was widespread. Today, an additional decade of IT and life experience has only served to reinforce this idea. Over the years, I’ve observed that poor communication, incompetence, bureaucracy and even corruption have not only brought many IT companies down to their knees, but also adversely affect various aspects of everyday life.

After some time trying to find my voice with the blog, I wrote the Programmer’s Ranch Writing Style Guide, hoping to keep my own writing of consistent quality and also inspire others. It’s nothing more than a few tips defining the general writing style that I felt worked for Programmer’s Ranch. The writing style has simplicity and clarity at its core, and is also reflected in the blog’s tagline: “More beef. Less bull.” It’s a radical departure from formal scientific papers, lengthy books, and various kinds of documentation which actually make learning harder.

Documentation is, in my opinion, one of the biggest failures of the software industry. Many companies and individuals seem to think of documentation as reference material, like an encyclopaedia. For instance, they publish a list of classes or endpoints exposed by their API and expect users of their software to make sense of them. In reality, what users usually need when working with a new library or API for the first time is basic usage examples. Given that (in my experience) most developers don’t like to write, the proliferation of open source projects hasn’t quite improved the situation.

Poor writing is, in reality, a specific case of poor communication. I can think of many examples outside of technical writing where overcomplication and lack of clarity cause problems. For instance, mystery meat navigation shifting to household furniture and appliances with modern/minimal designs, agile development approaches exacerbating the problems they were designed to solve, and the automation of customer service channels leaving customers struggling to ask a basic question about a service they’re paying for.

As a result, I feel it’s a breath of fresh air to read a technical article that is clear and concise once in a while. Even though there are countless tutorials about basic topics like HTML and CSS, it’s still nice (and helpful for newcomers) whenever someone writes about them in an accessible manner. Tania Rascia‘s website is the closest example of the Programmer’s Ranch writing style that I’ve found in the wild, and her focus on quality content and distancing from “ads, trackers, social media, affiliates, and sponsored posts” is quite likely behind its success.

Why I Write

There are many reasons to write on the web. The more altruistic of these is to share knowledge. Writing is a medium that endures, and although technical topics you write about may not have as long-lasting an impact as the works of Shakespeare, it is still very common for an article to help people for many years to come. Also, writing is easy to search and skim through, unlike other media such as audio or video.

There are also more personal and individual reasons to write, including:

  • Teaching others helps consolidate one’s own knowledge.
  • It’s therapeutic, sometimes requiring a level of focus that enables flow.
  • It can help demonstrate expertise and build one’s own reputation.
  • It helps remember topics and solutions from several years earlier.
  • It’s useful to save time arguing about the same topics over and over again.

Writing on the web does also have some disadvantages that the aspiring tech blogger would do well to be aware of:

  • It takes a lot of time to write good quality articles.
  • You won’t necessarily get any tangible benefit from it.
  • More specialised and unique articles will likely get less attention.
  • There are lots of rude and ungrateful people on the internet.

Conclusion

When I launched Programmer’s Ranch ten years ago, it was the beginning of my own journey towards maturity in technical writing. Although I haven’t always written good quality articles, I believe that many of them have been useful to a large audience and continue to be so. Their success lies not only in their content but also in the way it is communicated.

The web, the IT industry, and society in general are filled with content that is mediocre at best, making it hard for us to find the information we need even in an age where information is abundant and easy to obtain. There’s a lot we can improve in society by raising the bar, communicating better, and focusing on quality in the things that are important to us.

The Eighth Anniversary

One year ago today, on The Seventh Anniversary, I announced my retirement from tech blogging:

“However, at the same time, life circumstances have changed quite a bit, and my interest in free-time coding and writing has been waning. As a result, for the time being, I am retiring from tech blogging. It’s quite possible that I might write something interesting from time to time, but for now, let’s say I’m taking a break.”

Despite that, I managed to write five articles over the past year:

The first four are things I have been working with, whereas the last one is something from my MSc days that I’ve been wanting to write for a decade.

As I now celebrate the 8th anniversary of this blog, writing a handful of articles in a year doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, on The Sixth Anniversary I made the commitment to focus on quality rather than quantity. Having recently changed tech stack completely, I’ve been inspired to write about some things that I felt were both interesting and poorly documented, despite my apparent retirement from tech blogging.

And this is how it will continue to be: I’ll write something if and when I think it is useful to do so.

The Seventh Anniversary and Hiatus

It’s been another productive year for Gigi Labs, which today celebrates its 7th anniversary! Here are some of the more interesting things I’ve written in the year since the Sixth Anniversary:

Other than that, I released early versions of Sirius Planner, my calendar-based task planner. Feel free to give it a try if you need something to organise your day-to-day tasks.

And now, enough about the past and let’s talk about the future.

Since COVID19 changed the world, I’ve had a lot of time to explore and write about technologies that were either new to me (like Azure) or that I had been meaning to revisit (like Unity3D).

However, at the same time, life circumstances have changed quite a bit, and my interest in free-time coding and writing has been waning. As a result, for the time being, I am retiring from tech blogging. It’s quite possible that I might write something interesting from time to time, but for now, let’s say I’m taking a break.

Thanks for your support for the past seven years (or more, if you’ve been following Programmer’s Ranch or any of my other, earlier sites). I’ve received a lot of positive feedback about my articles and I hope people will continue to find them useful for many years to come.

The Sixth Anniversary

It’s been six years since Gigi Labs was launched. That’s a long time for any blog, and a third of my overall 18-year presence on the web.

In terms of content, Gigi Labs has slowed down but gone in some interesting directions. That’s mainly because of the way things generally turned out over the past year, including:

  • I spoke at a couple of conferences
  • I earned a couple of certifications
  • I gave up on Windows and have completely switched to using Linux at home
  • I’ve been doing more management and architecture than actual development
  • COVID19 means I have more time but less motivation to do development-related stuff in my spare time
  • I have continued writing long blog articles professionally in my free time
  • Getting really tired of WordPress as a blogging platform
  • Picking up a little gaming once again
My RedisGraph talk at RedisConf 2020

Here is a summary of some of the more interesting things I wrote over the past year:

Over the coming year, I’m not expecting to focus very much on writing new articles at Gigi Labs, for a number of reasons:

  • In most cases, anything I can write about software development, architecture or management is already covered somewhere on the web. I don’t want to contribute to information overload on the internet.
  • I don’t really want to write about management. There are far too many people blogging about management who think their particular experiences are universal wisdom that needs to be shared with the world.
  • Writing high-quality technical articles is very time-consuming and provides little reward.

I’ve always enjoyed sharing knowledge on the web – for free – and that’s not quite going to change. But just to make the best use of my own time, I’ll write some new content only when I feel it’s worth my time, i.e. when it’s something unique, fun, or even something existing that I can tell in a more concise and accessible manner (e.g. the C# Asynchronous Programming series). My old blog, Programmer’s Ranch, as well as Tania Rascia’s blog are good examples of the direction in which I’d like to take Gigi Labs.

Another thing that I think will change is Gigi Labs’ role as both my blog and my personal portfolio. I’m currently developing a new website which will keep track of my projects, websites, talks and other contributions, while Gigi Labs will go back to being just my creative outlet.

5 Years of Gigi Labs

Image generated using Name Birthday Cakes.

Yesterday, Gigi Labs turned five years old.

If you’ve been following Gigi Labs for a while, you’ve no doubt noticed that things have somewhat slowed down in the last couple of years. This is the result of a number of things, not least of which is having spent a year and a half living and working in Dublin, Ireland. I have also had the opportunity to write blog posts on a professional, freelance basis, and I continue to get involved in other things that allow me to keep learning.

One of the views from Killiney Hill Park, Dublin, Ireland on 10th February 2019. No, it’s not always raining in Dublin, and you can go on some really nice hikes even when it is.

More importantly, however, I’ve been trying to focus on writing quality articles using the little free time I have available, rather than simply blogging about whatever everyone else is talking about.

In fact, while the past couple of years have seen a mixture of content, I think they have included the publication of some of the most interesting articles on this blog to date, such as:

Also worth mentioning are some “Getting Started” articles, including a few on Microsoft Orleans 2.x, one on Angular 8, and another on Umbraco 8. I have a lot of such step-by-step beginner articles at Gigi Labs which often tend to be a good starting point for people wanting to start learning about new technologies.

I have had the fortune of learning a lot in these last two years, and I hope I will get the chance to share some of that. Even if articles might not be published very regularly, I hope that you will find that they’re worth the wait.

I also continue to be involved in the local tech community in Malta — in fact, I launched a new website in June called Teknologija to keep track of events across the various groups. I am also open to getting involved with and speaking at events abroad, so get in touch if you’re interested.

Thank you very much for your continued support!