Today’s post will be a meta post about the blog, its past and its future.

The past and the present

Two years ago tomorrow I published the first little post on this blog, and since then it has been quite a journey for me. I have been publishing weekly, with a single exception. With the first two months where I published twice a week, this is the 115th post on the blog.

I am still quite overwhelmed about the resonance this blog has gotten. A huge (for me at least) milestone has been reached a week ago with the 500’000th visitor. Other outcomes have been an interview at cppcast, an article in ACCU’s Overload journal and a few conference gigs.

Thanks

I have to thank a lot of people for their support and endorsements. The first to mention here is Jens Weller from MeetingC++ for spreading the word on Twitter, isocpp.org, and his blogroll. He as well gave me the opportunity to speak at his conference in 2016, which was a great experience. But there are also many others who seem to faithfully retweet any piece of writing I unleash on the world. To name just a few of many, there are Diego Losada from Conan, Manu Sánchez and Bartlomiej Filipek.

Future

I won’t be changing too much about the blog this year. The plan is to continue the weekly schedule, and the topics will still be roughly about maintainable, modern C++, clean code and testing. I plan, however, to have some guest posts once in a while, maybe once a month. So, if you would like to publish a post that fits in here, get in touch! It might be to get some visibility for your own personal blog, or because you feel it has to be said but wouldn’t fit into your on Template-Meta-Magic Blog.

Why guest posts?

Don’t get the wrong idea – I won’t be accepting marketing posts for commercial products. It’s OK to mention a product you have used if it’s not obvious marketing. It is also OK to write about open source products as long as they fit into the category. Promoting commercial products is however not in the scope of “Simplify C++!”. The blog has been and will stay ad-free and non-commercial (except for two or three affiliate links that didn’t bring me anything and that I remove when I find them), so making money should not be the goal for me or any contributor.

When I am asking for guest posts there are basically two reasons. I want to give something back to the C++ community. Contributing to a well-known blog can give a visibility boost to those who are just starting out with their own blog or open source project. The other reason is a little more selfish. Sometimes it is rather hard to come up with a new topic every week. It also costs a considerable amount of time to write a post about it. Being able to skip a post once in a while makes it easier for me and frees some time for other projects.