Archives
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Starting at Intergen
As alluded to earlier I have have shifted jobs, and have started at a place called Intergen. It is a bit of a culture shock going from 5 people working on one project to over 100 people working on more things than I can count.
So far the highlight at Intergen for me has definitely been the people. Besides all being very nice and a lot of fun to work with, Intergen has many of the best .NET developers in the country, including two MVPs and one of New Zealand's Microsoft Regional Directors.
Intergenite cast:
- John-Daniel Trask - New Zealand .NET Blog of the Year winner. Also known for crazy antics.
- Jeremy Norman - EPiServer expert and a very good Halo 2 player. I'm (currently) very bad so we often end up on the same team [:)]
- Trey Guinn - When we first met, for a second there, he had me believing that we were long lost friends. Americans!
- Nick Urry - Intergen developer and content management expert extraordinaire.
- Jeremy Boyd - New Zealand Microsoft Regional Director and MVP for SQL Server 2005.
- John Lewis - Part of the Intergen creative studio.
And many more who have not yet hopped on the blogging bandwagon. Thanks for making me feel welcome [:)]
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How to increase traffic to your blog - the Spolsky way
Although I don't always agree with some of his opinions on programming, Joel Spolsky's marketing skills have to be admired. In his most recent post Language Wars, Joel argues that when it comes to picking a computer language for a project you are best off picking the mainstream language you know best. Nothing revolutionary there.Along the way however he slams LISP and criticizes Ruby for not being suitable for commercial programming, citing failed projects, maturity and performance. As probably anyone who reads this knows, programmers can become extremely devoted to their language of choice (which is silly because .NET is obviously the best) and so they tend to get very fired up when their beloved is insulted. The beauty of Joel's post is he then cleverly baits those that he has annoyed by saying that his company has created its own in house language, something that runs completely against picking a safe choice he argued earlier. Subtle tongue in cheek most likely (at least I hope), but at the same time not entirely impossible. Either way Joel doesn't try to explain or justify this paradox in his post and so combines the aggrieved LISP and Ruby developers with ammunition to counter-attack, creating a feeding frenzy of posts, links and hits.
I've come across a number of posts listing ways to increase traffic to a blog recently but none have described anything like this. Joel, I salute you! [Y]
Update:
- Joel, you have got to be kidding
- Joel Gets Hammered
- Language Wars
- The Joel Wars
- If they have not seen farther...
- Joel on Language Wars
- Joel Spolsky run over by train. Pictures at 11.
- Serious business stuff T-shirt
- Fear, Uncertain[ty], and Doubt by Joel Spolsky (by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails!)
- Was Joel's Wasabi a joke? (a follow-up by David Heinemeier Hansson)
Update Part Deux: