Not Your Typical Top Ten Of 2008 Post

At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that.

But before I do, I thought it would be great to list the top 10 blog posts by others I read in 2008. The only problem is, I have very bad short-term memory and I can’t seem to remember which ones I read that had a real impact on my thinking. I’ll have to try and keep better track in 2009.

So based on a cursory Google search and look through my Google Reader app, here are some of my favorite blog posts of 2008 by you all, I couldn’t even list 10. Please do comment with your own favorite blog posts, mine or otherwise of 2008.

Favorite Posts I Read

• IT Industry Revolutionised by Labour Saving Device This one is pure comedy gold by Leon Bambrick, aka SecretGeek.
• jQuery and Microsoft A short post, but the significance of what the post indicates is more momentous than the post itself.
• On Our Project, We’re always 90% Done What top list would be complete without a CodingHorror link. It was hard to choose, but this one feels very appropriate to where I am right now.
• The Greatest Invention in Computer Science Another Atwood blog post. If I were to name the one blog that was my favorite in 2008, it would be his.
• Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding Not necessarily an impactful post, but extremely useful and one I reference often.
• The Single Most Important Thing You Must Do To Improve Your Programming Career Great advice from Raganwald, aka Reg Braithwaite.
• XKCD – Real Programmers And for good measure, an XKCD comic.

My Top Posts (Using the Ayende Formula)

A while back, Ayende wrote up a weighted query for Subtext to determine the top posts. I updated it to only include mine published in

1. Here are the top 5.

• Is Pizza Brain Food? A musing on whether Pizza was the source of my ability to absorb new information in college.
• Everything You Wanted To Know About MVC and MVP But Were Afraid To Ask Title says it all.
• Back From Mix Back To Reality Surprisingly, my post on the Mix conference was in the top three. I think this means the quality of my blog has declined.
• Updated Northwind Demo For ASP.NET MVC Beta Seems like a lot of people want to see simple samples for ASP.NET MVC.
• Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Beyond

Milestones Moments

There are some posts that I personally liked because they represent important events that happened to me in 2008.

• So Long L.A. And Thanks For All The Fish It was in January of this year that my family and I left Los Angeles. This post was my homage to Los Angeles, with plenty of photos.
• What happened to You’ve Been HAACKED? Someone out there (well just Sean Chambers) cares enough to call me out for the declining quality of my blog. My god, he was right! It was a wake up call and I hope to improve in 2009.
• ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications I gave my first PDC talk ever with Jeff Atwood who talked briefly about StackOverflow. It was great fun! While at PDC, I discovered a new presentation tip.
• Subtext 2.1 Released! Contains Security Update After a long hiatus, we finally produced two more releases of Subtext one after the other.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta Released! We finally got the first Beta for ASP.NET MVC.

Ok, so maybe this post is pretty typical and doesn’t live up to the title I gave it. Oh well, I tried.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a whole lot of other important events that happened in 2008. I’m probably neglecting great blog posts that I read. But that’s the great thing about a blog, I’m confident people will point out my shortcomings in the comments to this post, and for that, I’m grateful. You all rock!

And with that, I leave you with this moment of zen, a photo taken near my house.