This blog is 10

Just over ten years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 after previously blogging on the original Linden Lab hosted Creation Engine and before that on Terra Nova. So, while I’ve been blogging for almost 14 years, 10 years of The Creation Engine No. 2 seems like a good excuse to look back at the last decade of blogging.

Behind the scenes the technology behind The Creation Engine No. 2 has changed a lot. Originally hosted as a Django site on Byteflow, I converted the blog to a static site generated by Pelican and hosted by github almost exactly 5 years ago. I wrote a post at the time detailing the move, which I finally published on its 5th birthday after rediscovering it today. Despite the big changes behind the scenes, github’s support for custom domains and Pelican’s support for RSS import meant that the only externally visible changes to The Creation Engine No. 2 were cosmetic. All the RSS feeds and links to the site were unaffected, which is great because Cool URIs don’t change.

While the technology has changed a lot, the content continues to mostly be a hack diary describing the various contributions I’ve made to projects like the EVE CREST API, nailgun, buck, infer and ReactVR. I write these posts as documentation in case I have to solve similar problems in future, but it’s also great when they’re useful to others, so I’m very happy to see that my recent set of posts about using ReactVR with Redux have been my most popular posts to date.

I don’t attend as many conferences now as I did while I was working at Linden Lab, but the various conference write up posts serve a similar purpose: reminding me about the talks and speakers I’ve seen and hopefully also pointing others to useful information. Social media is now more effective for letting people know about future events, so I rarely use The Creation Engine to announce upcoming events, but still think its a useful place to collect longform thoughts about past events and links to recordings.

One post which doesn’t fit in to the above catatories is my review of Now We Are 40 and thoughts on growing up with the web. Part of the reason I posted it here is because I could. I don’t need someone to speak for me or my generation, I can do it myself. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to share my thoughts with the world for the last decade and very happy that a lot of people have found them useful.

Happy birthday to The Creation Engine No. 2. Here’s to the next 10.