5 Years Later...

I was working on another post today and noticed that I had just exceed the 400,000 pageviews milestone! The next thing that caught my eye is that it has been 5 years to the day since my first post. So I thought I'd write an article reflecting the past five years.

I started this blog (initially called apex-smb.blogspot.com) to simply post some of code I was working on and elicit feedback from the community. Seemed simple to me: post some code and get free feedback. Over the life of this blog I certainly did get a lot of feedback. I also got a lot more than I had imagined. Since my initial post I have achieved many milestones that I didn't think were possible or hadn't even thought of when I first started. These include:

By far the best outcome is the relationships I've built with people in the Oracle community around the world. This is especially true with the people that I looked up to (and still do) when I first started working with APEX (called HTMLDB back then).

I'm not going to say that this blog is the sole reason for everything that took place over the past 5 years. There were a lot of people that helped support and encourage me along the way. Without their continued support I don't think I'd be in the positive situation that I am in today.

This blog started out as a fun side project with no real motive other than to share code and help improve my writing skills. Turns out it changed a lot for me and went well past its initial intentions. The only "negative" thing (and I use the term very loosely) is that over the past few years I haven't had the same amount of time that I would like to allocate to writing articles at the same pace when I first started. This is primarily due to running a company, writing various books, working on open source projects, and my speaking engagements (and yes I realize that these are all "first world problems").

Going forward I plan to still continue writing. It's something that I really enjoy doing and I hope you, as a reader of this blog, enjoy as well.

Looking forward to the next 5 years!

  • Martin