How can I make you learn and benefit from my Blog? and how can I learn from you?

Summer is almost over and a new season of heavy work is beginning.  I wanted to take this opportunity to start on a new page and make sure that I’m spending my cycles doing the right things. 

I’ve been blogging for almost 3 years now and throughout the blogs life I’ve been blogging pretty much the same way, trying to show examples of where me and fellow developers have gotten into situations that have caused crashes, memory leaks, exceptions, hangs etc., so that we can all learn from the situations and avoid them.

Throughout the 3 years I have gotten a lot of comments saying that posts have helped developers, but I have also gotten more private comments saying that what I am talking about lies so far out of their realms that they don’t understand half of what I am saying.  Some of these comments have come from people that I know and respect and that I know are extremely proficient developers, which makes me think that maybe I am not explaining things in a very understandable or approachable way.  

I have also noticed that people tend to send me private emails rather than comment on the blog, maybe because people feel a bit too intimidated by post-mortem debugging to comment directly on the blog since the topic is a bit low-level. Maybe I am all wrong and that is not at all why people email me rather than comment:)

Either way, since this has been bugging me for a while, I wanted to let you know how I look at my blog and what I want it to be, and I also wanted to solicit your ideas on how to make it more that way.

My philosophy with the blog

I work as an ASP.NET Support Escalation Engineer which means that my job is to help developers solve these types of issues.  When I can help them resolve their issues that makes both me and them happy.   In reality though they would probably be a lot happier if they could resolve their own issues and didn’t have to call, or even more happy if they didn’t have these issues in the first place.

With all that, my goal has always been to try to avoid that people need to call support, so effectively my goal is to make my job obsolete:).  I realize that people will always run into pitfalls so I set up this blog to teach people debugging and make people more aware about the internals of asp.net and the CLR, and to learn from each other.

I want people to be less intimidated by debugging and see that it is in fact something that we can all do, something that is useful to all developers and something that is not as difficult or far out there as it may seem at first look.

I want people to ask lots of questions, or comment on things that they want to know more about, don’t understand or don’t agree with.  The more such comments and questions there are, the more I and others can learn from them.  In a perfect world, this would be a nice debugging community where we all learn from each other.

My ask from you

I would like to learn from you what ideas you have around how I can accomplish this goal better. 

How many of you just glance at the posts and think “hmm, probably interesting for someone who is deep down into debugging but I’ll never use this”?  How many of you really read them and learn something from them?

Are the posts too long, too short, too deep, not deep enough, too boring, too many stupid jokes?

What makes you shy away from a post and what makes you want to learn more? 

How can I make things more applicable to the world you live in?

What do you want to see more or less of?

How can I help you so that you can apply more of what I am talking about to your day to day job?

Do you want me to mix up the debugging posts more with some lighter posts about other topics?  If so, what would you be interested in? 

Feel free to be as candid as you can:)

 

Have fun,
Tess