One hundred posts

This happens to be the 100th post on this blog. When I started this blog, I didn’t know if I was even going to write 10 posts, let alone a hundred, so I decided to dig into the older versions of this blog, and reflect on how this site has evolved.

Blogger, 2007

I started the first version of blog on Blogger back in 2007, when I was still in college. I didn’t have anything interesting to write, but I wanted to practice writing. A blog seemed like a good way to start.

A couple of years later, I was working as a programmer, so I decided to use the blog as a log of things I learned about programming. For a while after that, the site was called Binary Doodles.

Wordpress, 2009

In 2009, I decided to migrate to Wordpress. I was working at a startup where I occasionally worked on a Wordpress site. Wordpress was more flexible than Blogger, and hosting my own blog sounded like fun. I bought the domain nithinbekal.com, and ran the blog on a cheap Bluehost server.

Jekyll, 2013

Almost exactly 10 years ago, I decided to migrate the blog again. I wasn’t writing much anyway, and it felt like Wordpress was too complex for what I needed. Self hosting a Wordpress blog felt like an unnecessary chore. A static site generator sounded like a better option now. As a Rubyist, Jekyll was the obvious choice.

At first, the site was served on a cheap VPS. A year later, I decided to simplify things further, and moved it to Github Pages. Making it simpler to maintain freed me up to actually write here. Over half of the posts here were written in 2014-15, with a whopping 32 posts in 2015!

Finding a job

This blog also led to my current job at Shopify. Some of the Ruby posts here were being linked as references in code reviews in the team I eventually joined, because of which the manager decided to interview me.

Ironically, one of my teammates linked one of my own articles during a code review a few months later. Although I had written about it, I had forgotten all about it. So it turned out that this blog is still working as intended, as a reference for myself. :)

Now

I’ve been writing less frequently over the past 5 years. The only things I’ve written regularly are my “what’s new in Ruby” and “favorite books of the year” posts.

This year, I decided to stop worrying about writing polished articles (not that the articles are very polished now!). Instead, I want to go back to writing more like how it started, with more TIL-style posts, or how-to’s of whatever I’m playing with.