On Saturday, November 6th, 2004, I wrote the text what would become my first blog post. It’s in Spanish, and I wrote it on my beloved iBook G3 near a boarding gate at the Ezeiza International Airport, after having spent a long month in Buenos Aires visiting family and friends.
Back in those days I was living in a small apartment in Lausanne. I was single, working as a software engineer for Thales in Geneva, mostly writing .NET apps in Visual Basic.NET for Nestlé.
I had had a personal website since August 1996, including random writing without schedule or organization, but it was only in November 2004, after returning from a month-long trip to Buenos Aires, that I decided to start using Movable Type and to regularly publish new material on a blog. After Movable Type, I switched to WordPress in 2006, and then to Hugo in 2020 (quite exactly 4 years ago today, by the way!)
Reading those words again takes me back to a time when I could feel that change was in the air. I had not met Claudia yet; that would happen for the first time a few weeks later, in February 2005. We would marry less than two years later. I was four years away from graduating and from starting akosma software, five years away from my mother’s passing, eight years away from my first O’Reilly book, nine years away from my depression crisis, fourteen years away from the start of De Programmatica Ipsum, and nineteen years away from my LinkedIn course about OpenShift.
I partially stopped blogging regularly from 2015 to late 2020, with short stints at Medium; I didn’t, however, stop writing at all. The texts you can find on the archives of this blog during those years include much of my production, most of it conference speeches and other small pieces that came out during this period.
So many things, some great and some less good, have happened in the past 20 years. It’s uncanny to look back at all that. So, here’s to the next 20 years, and as usual, thanks for reading.
Update, 2024-11-08: I forgot that from February to November 2004 I tried Mambo CMS, a now discontinued CMS written in PHP. Some of the blog posts dated 2004 were originally published in that platform. As explained in this article, I ended up migrating to Movable Type in November of that year.