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Fifteen

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Without my noticing, this blog turned fifteen.

That’s a long time. Apart from Alejandro Barros’s blog, which started earlier, I don’t know of another Chilean blog this old (if anyone knows of one, let me know).

Despite the irregular schedule, this blog is still alive, still gets visited and linked to, and has a healthy and loyal audience.

I’ve written so many things on this blog that putting together an anthology is hard. Not counting this one, there are 1024 posts (a round number :wink:), but I’ll try to recommend a couple of articles per year:

2005

2006

  • “Blogmemes and Meneame, two different systems”: in 2006 I built a site called blogmemes, a sort of shared news aggregator. The site got to more than 50,000 users, but I took it down some time later. There were several similar sites imitating Digg.com, at the height of the blog boom. In Spain there was Meneame, a site created by Ricardo Galli. There was some competition at the beginning and a few comparisons, but I didn’t pursue the idea and BlogMemes was shut down. Meneame is still going: https://www.meneame.net/. Today I read this pair of tweets from Ricardo Galli, creator of Meneame:

And they reflect the problem of running a social-network kind of site: it eats up a lot of time and effort, and it’s sure to be the target of unfair criticism. Back then I wasn’t up for adding those worries to my life.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

  • “Measure and react”: without knowing it, I wrote a post about one of the most important principles behind why companies should adopt agile.

  • “Irrational decisions”: this is the first article in a series I wrote that year about the rationality of our decisions and the fallacy of common sense. I never put it in a book; I think that’s something I should fix.

2012

  • “What is the truth?”: this is a post about post-truth, before that term became popular and people started using it.

  • “A lunch at Lafayette Square”: if I could travel in time I would visit this place at this exact moment to eavesdrop on this conversation between Von Neumann and two of his most brilliant students.

2013

  • “We are not cooks”: a long post, and I mean long, written to answer an academic’s thesis that I thought was wrong at the time, a position I still largely hold. Courage to whoever dares to read it and comment on it.

2014

  • “Sex, pianos and WiFi”: talking about Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to technology has become a commonplace, but in 2014 few people knew her story. In fact, even today the story gets told incompletely, leaving out George Antheil’s contribution and the strange relationship between these two artists who, united in frivolity, ended up developing such a momentous technology. This must be one of the few texts on the subject that tells the whole story.

2015

2016

2017

2018

  • “The Chain”: the start of a series about blockchain, but from a rather peculiar angle that may surprise you.

  • “Who is responsible for quality?”: the old and pointless argument over whether it’s QA or Development gets settled when we go back to the origin of things.

2019

2020

Wrapping up

I hope you like the selection; I had fun reminiscing as I went back over these posts.

I want to take the chance to thank all my sponsors on Patreon, those who have come and gone and those who are still there, for their support and trust.

And if you like what I write, you can visit my Ko-fi account and buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/lnds. Your contribution helps keep this and other sites running, and helps prepare future projects.

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