Last August, Tekpub co-founder and ex-Microsoft employee Rob Conery presented a challenge to all developers: build your own blog. He suggested that a self-built blog engine would serve perfectly as a résumé, and that makes a lot of sense to me.
Most of the code I’ve written over the years is either:
a) proprietary, and owned by the company I was working for when I wrote it
– or –
b) embarrassing throw-away code that helped me learn some concept, but isn’t good enough for anyone else to see.
Writing a blog engine is a great idea because once it matures I can start dogfooding, migrate my existing blog to it, and build in the features I want the most. It’s also an opportunity to practice and learn new skills. Here are some things I haven’t tried yet, or would like to use more but haven’t had the chance:
- Mercurial
- TDD
- ASP.NET MVC 2.0
- Entity Framework 4.0
- jQuery
Therefore, I’m announcing here and now that I’m taking the challenge. I plan on hosting the project on bitbucket.org so anyone can see or use it. I’ll post updates here as I make progress.
The Public Void 
Right on! You’ll have a great time :). Make sure you check out fun things like Jekyll and Sinatra … amazing and interesting ways of doing “static” blogging – hosting at Github of all things…
Thanks, Rob! I’ve been doing Web Forms for quite a while now and I feel like I need to start expanding my horizons. This seemed like a good way to do it. On a related note, I just started reading Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 and noticed you’re a co-author. Looks like an awesome book.