One year later

Today, it's my blog's first anniversary, so I thought this is a good opportunity to do some reflection about it.

Motivation

So why have I started this blog in the first place? The main reason is that as a software engineer and researcher, I don't necessarily only write code or write academic papers:

• Sometimes I have to solve engineering problems, instead of doing science (whatever that means). In my opinion, this is also interesting and useful to report about. For example, while most of my research is about Nix, NixOS, Disnix, sometimes I have to apply my work in specific scenarios/environments which is challenging enough to get it to work. A notable example is the deployment .NET software. Without proper application of the stuff I'm investigating, the usefulness of my research isn't so great either.
• Sometimes I have to express ideas and opinions. For example, what others say about the research we're doing or about general software engineering issues.
• Sometimes I need to do knowledge transfer about issues I have to keep explaining over and over again, like the blog post about software deployment in general.
• Sometimes I have some fun projects also well.

The main purpose of my blog is to fill this gap with academic paper publishing. Apparently, it seems that some of my blog posts have raised quite some attention, which I'm very happy about. Moreover, some blog posts (like the .NET related stuff) also gave me some early feedback which helped me solving a problem which I was struggling with for a long time.

Writing for a blog

For some reason, I find writing blog posts more convenient than writing academic papers. In order to write an academic paper I have to take a lot of stuff into account next to the scientific contribution I want to make. For example:

• Because I'm doing research in software deployment and because this is a neglected research topic, I have to adapt my paper to fit in the scope of a conference I have to submit to, because they are typically about something else. This is not always easy.
• I have to identify the audience of the particular conference and learn about the subjects and concepts they talk about.
• I have to read a lot of related work papers to determine the exact scientific contribution and to describe what the differences are.
• I have to integrate my idea into the concepts of the given conference.
• I have to explain the same concepts over and over again, because they are not generally understood. What is software deployment? Why is software deployment difficult and important? What is Nix? Why is Nix conceptually different compared to conventional package managers? etc. etc.
• In each paragraph, I have to convince the reader over and over again.
• It should fit within the page limit
• I have to keep myself aware of the fact that my paper must be scientific paper and not an engineering paper.

Writing for my blog is actually much easier for me, because I don't have to spent so much time on these other issues next to the contribution I want to make. Furthermore, because I can link to earlier topics and I know my audience a bit, I don't have to explain the same things over and over again.

Although these observations are quite negative, this does not mean that I want to claim that I shouldn't write any academic papers and that academic papers are useless, but nonetheless it's still a funny observation I have.

Blog posts

Another funny observation is the top 10 of most popular blog posts. The top 10 (at this time) is as follows:

1. Software deployment complexity. I'm happy that my general blog post about software deployment complexity has raised so much attention, because within the software engineering research community it's typically an ignored subject. In just one week, it surpassed the number of hits of all my other blog posts.
2. Second computer. For some reason my blog post about my good ol' Commodore Amiga is very popular. For a long time, this was actually my most popular blog post and it's not even research related! It seems that 19 years after Commodore's demise, the Amiga is far from dead.
3. First blog post. This is the first blog post in which I briefly introduce myself. Apparently, people want to know who I am :-)
4. NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution. This is a general blog post explaining the idea and features of NixOS, the Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager, which we use as a foundation for our current research project.
5. First computer. Apart from my good ol' Commodore Amiga, my first computer the: Commodore 128 also still lives on!
6. The Nix package manager. This blog post covers the Nix package manager, on which NixOS is built. Apparently people are interested in the main Nix concepts as well.
7. Concepts of programming languages. This blog post is about the 'Concepts of programming languages' course taught at the TU Delft, for which I was a teaching assistent. This course covers various programming languages, which are conceptually different from each other. I actually have no idea why this blog post is so popular.
8. Using NixOS for declarative deployment and testing. This blog post covers two very nice applications of NixOS in which you can automatically deploy a distributed network of NixOS machines and use the same specification to generate a network of virtual machines for testing. I have presented this topic at FOSDEM, Europe's biggest free and open source software event, and my presentation was well received there :-).
9. On Nix, NixOS and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS). This blog post responds to one of the common criticisms I have received about Nix and NixOS from other distributions. In this blog post I explain why we are different and that it's for a very good reason.
10. Self-adaptive deployment with Disnix. This blog post is about one of my biggest research contributions, which I have presented at the SEAMS symposium (co-located with ICSE) in Hawaii. In this blog post I have built a framework on top of Disnix and the underlying purely functional deployment model of Nix to make systems self-adaptable by redeployment in case of an event.

My biggest surprise is the fact that the Amiga stuff is so popular. Actually, I have some fun projects that I'm working on, so if I can find any time for it, there may be more to report about.

Conclusion

It seems for me that it pays off to have blog, so hopefully next year there will be much more interesting things to report about. I have one more thing to say and that is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!! (I took the fireworks picture above during the ICSE in Hawaii, just in case you wanted to know ;) )