On April 13th, 2004, I put up my first post on RossCode.com. It was not my blogging debut, but it was my first time that I felt at home with blogging. I'd just purchased RossCode.com, and was ready to get started.

A lot has happened over the past two years for me, and it's interesting (to me) to go back through the archives and see where I've come. Reading the first few posts here is, well, to be frank, painful. My writing style really hadn't developed, and it showed. I think at least now that what I write is slightly more readable. In other words, don't go back to the archives!

Personally, in the past two years, we had our second daughter, born just 13 days before my one year blogging anniversary - hence why I never really highlighted that fact! She recently turned one, while my oldest daughter is turning 4 this summer. It's amazing how time flies!

Professionally, I've basically been working on the same project for the past two years. On April 27th, 2004, I talked vaguely about heading to California, and moving onto another project. Well, that project turned out to be a huge opportunity for me - I ended up being the lead developer on that team, and about one year later, we launched their website. Since launch, I've still been working with them and helping them integrate into third party systems and providing more automation of their processes. It's been a great project and a very good learning experience for me.

And yes, the timeline is correct - the website launched on March 30th 2005, and my daughter was born on April 1st, 2005. It's a good thing we had a great testing team working with us up to the launch. I took two weeks off right after launch, and there were no major issues or bugs found after the launch. In fact, the only major issue we've had with the site since launch was a hardware failure.

Next up:?Tourney Logic. My side business. It was actually founded in the summer of '02, but a lot has happened since I started this whole thing. Our biggest time period is March Madness, so I started blogging shortly after things slowed down for TL. But in '05, we did a ton of work to get March Madness ready to go. We started hosting pools at that time, and we launched automatic result downloads, making administering pools dirt simple. Since then, we rewrote, well, basically everthing. The Tourney Bracket Control was built from the ground up last summer and the Tourney Pool Manager was converted over to .NET 2.0, and was the basis for our complete hosting solution - Tourneytopia, which we launched a couple of months ago. As a company, Tourney Logic has been profitable since it's first "official" year - we started in '02, but didn't have anything to offer until '03, and we've been profitable ever since. Since starting this blog, Tourney Logic has more than quadrupled!

I've definitely upped my blog subscriptions too. At the time, I think I was using RSS Bandit and less than?100 feeds. Now, I've moved to a distributed model and using FeedDemon - I actually paid for software! - and Newsgator Online, and their mobile version of Newsgator Online. Plus, I now have 933 feeds.

Then, based on my blog reading addict...obsess...habits, I started podcasting, doing a weekly show highlighting the biggest technology news for the week. The one year anniversary of that is coming up in May, although it started out in written format until I was brave enough to record it starting in October - which means my 6 month podcasting anniversary was last week. I'm up to #43 now, and still going strong.

And then there's the friendships that I've developed. Those are the most rewarding part of this whole thing. Knowing that there are people out there that I call friends simply based on interaction on this blog?is an amazing thing that I never imagined when I started. I'm not going to mention names because with all the people I've met, I don't want to leave someone?out, but you all know who you are!

It's been a great run, and it's one that is definitely not done! If I'm not still doing this in five years, I'd be surprised!