How much did I blog?

Having a blog since around the end of 2007 means I’ve been blogging publicly for the last decade. It is a bunch of time, a lot of things happened and changed both in my life as well as in the readers lifes.

The importance to `teach`

Before getting to the numbers, a short but needed disclaimer: the quantity of posts does not reflect in any point the quality of the blog(ger). So what is the whole point of pointing out the number of posts? It reflects, in my opinion, the effort to teach to somebody else. That’s also the reason why I don’t do twitter and alike: I’m not interested in relaunching someone else post or news or idea, I’m interested in teaching (technical) stuff to people. Why? Because teaching is the only true way to learn. That seems controversial, but trust me: if you want to learn something, you have to teach it to someone else. Probably this is the way I did succeed so quickly in University: I was always trying to explain to some other (sometime imaginary) person the concept I was studying. When you study a subject or a topic, it is perfectly fine for you to learn almost the full 100% on such subject, leaving a small percentage out because you don’t understand, or it is poorly explained, or you don’t have time to try it out, or resources to perform the tasks and so on. After all, you will know the main concepts (being main not the 100%), and chances are you will never be asked by your tutor, colleague, friend, for that small part you don’t know or that is hidden behind fog in your mind. But if you have to teach the subject to someone else, you have to clear your mind first and be sure you can explain from different point of views, with different terminology and, most notably, with the full 100% knowledge with you. Once you commit to such idea, it becomes a natural path to learn by teaching. So, every piece of code, of paper, note, homework, you do must be done diligentely and with the idea of explaining things to another person, that could be you in the future. But while you are taking notes for yourself, why not release such notes as public and open? That will allow you for meeting other people, with other ideas on the same subject. That will give you a user base with questions and replies to be filled. And yes, that requires time, so it’s not a for free task. Now, I’m not stating this blog is a good place to learn things. Sometimes I got screwed up, sometime I wrote things that are in a rush, or trivial, or are simple rants. After all, I’m a human being myself, so doing an async teaching is not a trivial task and is performed as a labor of love.

The data

The following is an excerpt summary year by year. As readers can see, there is no particular trend in posting ratio, it simply does depends on how much I’m excited about a particular subject and, most notably, how much time do I have to write something. Writing a bad post just as a “keep-alive” entry is not important at all to me. So, for the records:

in 2008 I have written 154 posts
in 2009 I have written 61 posts
in 2010 I have written 124 posts
in 2011 I have written 110 posts
in 2012 I have written 95 posts
in 2013 I have written 83 posts
in 2014 I have written 70 posts
in 2015 I have written 46 posts
in 2016 I have written 83 posts
in 2017 I have written 148+ posts (as of this same blog post, obviously)

I’ve created a simple and dirty Perl 5 script to produce some Gnuplot output year by year. In the following, you will see such graphical representations, but again please consider there is no particular trend (or at least none I’m aware of).