This is just a short, bragging post, to let you know that this site has so far visited by over one million people. Yes, we’ve been online since April 2009 so it has taken me over 7 years to reach this point. Still, I am proud of what we have accomplished. I say “we” because more and more I try to convince people to write here, everybody that has inteesting things to say is welcome, just get in touch.
And the best part is that we keep growing, slowly but steady (now averaging over 1000 visits per day) so I hope it won’t take me another seven years to reach the second million. I do have plenty of ideas to move the site forward and make it THE reference site for software engineering news (as always, with an emphasis on the “engineering” word and a passion for all things modeling-related). Again, I’d love to know your opinions and ideas on how to improve this site, specially if you’re open to help implementing them as well.
In case you’re curiours the 5 largest one-day spykes in the figure correspond to the following posts (in order of importance; for each spyke we only take the most popular day):
- In 2008, I bought a book titled “PHP 6”. Six years later, PHP version is still 5.5. August, 28th 2014. 19051 visits
- 10 JavaScript libraries to draw your own diagrams April, 5th 2015. 13821 visits. Still one of the most popular posts today.
- 101companies: One system – more than 100 alternative software implementations February, 20th 2012. 4010 visits.
- 85% of projects in Github have never been forked.March 18th, 2014. 3772 viits. One of the first GitHub mining studies we did. See others.
- Reasons for not contributing more to open source projects (poll results). November, 22th 2014. 2892 visits
And beyond this five you have another 1347 posts more to read 🙂
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. More about me.
Compliments!
Having a blog myself I know how hard is to reach this number of visitors by publishing technical content. I admire your perseverance.
I always thought of this blog as “the” reference for MDD: I hope that you will not get too distracted by general software engineering and keep writing posts on modeling.
If more of software engineering was model-based my life would be definitely easier. And if the modeling community would write more posts talking about their tools/techniques that would be even better but I guess many researchers don’t see the benefit of writing stuff if it’s not indexed on DBLP 🙂
My impression is that the interesting stuff in modeling is not happening in research centers anyway 🙂
Once you have all core elements in place (metamodeling and transformation languages, for instance), it’s true that most research becomes incremental (better quality, more scalability,…).
Yes, and I guess you also need more resources to produce those improvements. It is probably easier to find the time and money in companies to do that kind of resources.
Personally I am very interested in seeing how we develop best practices and usage patterns for projectional editors now that we have them. This is probably the kind of research it is easier to do at companies.