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.