A year back on this very day, I decided to start my own blog and that’s how dotnetvibes.com came into existence. At that point, I did not have any plan or roadmap on what I wanted to achieve – but just wanted to keep track of all my learning in a single place and share it with the community. Few of my colleagues at work also encouraged me to get started with writing blog posts and that was my first step into this exciting world of technical blogging.

Today on 1st January, 2017 – exactly a year later – I must admit that it has been an eventful journey with lot of excitement, learning, challenges and acquaintances.

Be it writing new blogs, finalizing topics to write on, ensuring the content is of high quality, sharing the articles in social media, responding to questions from visitors, finding ways to increase the blog traffic – I have realized that there is considerable amount of effort needed to maintain a blog site. However it has been lot of fun all along the way and I have definitely learned more than the efforts I have put into it.

One of the reasons why I love writing technical blogs is getting constant feedback from the community and most of the times, it helps me to improve and there is always something new to learn and a different perspective to look at things. Throughout this entire process I got an opportunity to interact and know a lot of knowledgeable folks in the community & build a good professional network. Twitter played a key role in this and has been my number one source for being up to date on the latest & greatest technical news.

I posted a total of 35 articles in 2016 and had about 24000 views & 16000 unique visitors. Considering this was my first year blogging, I am very excited with what I have achieved.

Out of the 34 articles posted this year, the top 5 most visited articles were —
10 Best Practices for Code Commenting
Manage your Technical Debt with Visual Studio 2015 and SonarQube
Improve your Code Quality using Live Code Analyzers
Time Travel in SQL Server 2016 with Temporal Tables
Increase your Code Review efficiency with Visual Studio Code Metrics

Sharing articles in LinkedIn groups, Google+, Twitter and Facebook have got the most traffic to my site. I received lot of valuable feedback on my articles, especially in LinkedIn groups – so I find it to be a great platform to share.

This year I also started speaking in User Group Meetings, Code Camps and One day events in Birmingham and Atlanta region. Generally before my presentation, I prefer to write multiple blogs around the same topic. I have found this very beneficial – since it helps me to prepare thoroughly for my presentation and also for my attendees who now have articles to refer back, once the presentation is over.

You can find about all my past and upcoming speaking assignments here —
https://dotnetvibes.wordpress.com/speaking/

One last thing which really helped me in 2016 was being part of two awesome User Groups in Birmingham –
Birmingham .NET Meetup
Steel City SQL Server User Group

Being the Co-Chapter Lead of the SteelCity User Group, I took up additional responsibilities in organizing the user group meetings. I have been quite active in participating in the .NET events as well.

We have had some great speakers and awesome sessions with loads of learning throughout the entire year. User Groups are a great platform to connect with the bright minds, share knowledge with other developers, learn new stuffs and get exposure to the latest and greatest in technology. There were multiple occasions when I got some great blog topic ideas, based on my discussions during these user group meetings.

I would highly encourage all of you to look for active user groups in your region and be a part of it.

What to expect in 2017?

I have enjoyed every bit of this journey last year and plan to continue writing in 2017 with more vigor.

I would like to Thank all my readers for your likes, comments, constant feedback, retweets across social networking sites. Keep reading and sharing!

Categories: C#, Conference, SQL Server, Visual Studio