Wednesday, July 31, 2013

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:

- Co-founding ClariFit
- Writing several books
- Becoming an Oracle ACE, then later ACE Director
- Working on various open source projects

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

2 comments:

  1. That's five years worth doing - well done, Martin!

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  2. Hi Martin,

    I hear you on the time thing. I'm only now reading this after all ;)

    But congrats none the less. And may the next 5 years be as fruitful as the last, no matter where you decide to focus and invest your energy.

    Regards,
    Dan

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