Hello, World! (five years on)

So today marks exactly five years of (in)consistent blogging, after this auspicious start in April 2011.

Overall, it has been both an enjoyable, but at times, stressful experience: from trying to develop my blogging/communication skills (with 300+ posts), attempting to develop an audience (with 300,000+ views, including hundreds of followers and regular readers), then refining into a forum for discussing my academic activities, broadly defined (read: shameless self–promotion, including a change of domain name). While it is great to have a venue for both formal and informal writing, the pressure of regularly delivering #content occasionally compounds the traditional academic writing pressures. Nevertheless, it has been an overall positive experience, improving my writing and communication skills, as well allowing me to be in control of a personal online space for showcasing my research, policy, teaching and media work, as well as for storing quotes and miscellany.

So, in time-honoured fashion, here are top five posts since records began:

1. A set of top Computer Science blogs
2. Grant applications, early 20th century style
3. Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm
4. Programming is the start not the end: let’s develop computational thinking and problem solving skills
5. A set of top Computer Science Education blogs

Thank you all for reading! Here’s to another five years.

(you might also like: The Best Of…2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011)