Why Do I Write This Blog?

I'll be honest:

Origin

Originally I wrote fair amount in my OneNote. However due to usual big business reasons, I was not able to access said notes from work. So what if I just had public notes? In a space that I could keep in the way I wanted and that might have niche topics to help out the other poor sod that a very particular problem.

So that's where my site you're reading stemmed from. And at the time of writing this, my about page has this:

Inspired by Scott Hanselman's Your Words are Wasted, I decided to start writing posts such that if nothing else - I could find my own solutions again.

"Do it for you"

Teaching and learning is rewarding. It takes a lot of effort to teach and it forces you to more better understand your topic. I really wanted to get into the new .NET AoT and write on the topic. To do that, I needed to understand enough to write. From it came a few AoT posts and one of my favourite posts: Shrinking a Self-Contained .NET 6 Wordle-Clone Executable.

Ardalis, a big name in the .NET space uses his website to share his wealth of knowledge. Whether it's:

• Complex - Should Controllers Reference Repositories or Services
• A quick solution to an error - dotnet-ef does not exist
• Important to him - Be Humble and Kind or Die Hard is a Christmas Movie

Or one that is extremely relevant right now: Share What You Learn (even if you're not an expert)

Let's look at another name in the software space, Gergely Orosz of pragmaticengineer fame.

In 2021 a classmate who I hadn't spoken to since university messaged me thanking me for help. He had honestly come across my Why is .GetAwaiter().GetResult() bad in C#? post from searching and it helped him find a bug in his software from the other side of the planet. HOW COOL IS THAT? 🤩

My Own Garden

I ran into this post Herman Martinus called "My product is my garden", which resonated with me. Especially this:

I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so.

Living my best life, writing about .NET, Pokémon, and niche solutions that might help others.

Oh and in terms of my platform, I deliberately chose Ghost (Pro) because:

1. I didn't want to think about managing the infra, updates, outages, etc. That's my job, I don't want to manage it at home
2. I'm not then beholden to a greater power such as at Medium, or one of the C# technical blogging websites
3. It does all the things I want it to do, which isn't all the bells and whistles

I can happily sit here, in my little corner of the internet, farming away at my little crops.

To Conclude

I'm having fun learning, helping, and keeping record of my niche interests. It's been great to refer back to my website at work and with friends. If you're reading this, I hope you enjoyed your stay for whichever post you read, and thank you for dropping by my little garden 👩‍🌾