22 July 2021

The end of this blog - August 16th


Road ends


It's time to pack this blog up and put it away. On 16th August I'll be taking this blog off the internet.

Better Projects started in about August 2005. The first post was "Capturing details about the WBS"

I started this blog as I started a masters' degree at RMIT in Project Management. The course coordinator required us to keep a learning journal thoughout the course. Blogs were relatively new at the time and no no particular reaso I decided to keep my learning journal in public.

Who knows why we take those first steps into the unknown?

There have been 1442 posts including this one. (I have 141 in draft that I never found the time to properly research or write.)  The blog has had more than 4 million views over the years. At it's peak it was getting in the order of 130-140k views per month.  These days it is still getting 25-30K views a month, which is amazing given how infrequently I post these days.

I am glad the content has been useful.

The blog itself was never about promoting myself or any commercial venture. It emerged at a time where blogging was about people collectively exploring ideas together. It was very much a community of learners. The bloggers themselves were learning in public and generally writing to themselevs or to each other.

Communities are great. 

I do feel that age of blogging died with Web2.0 businesses like Facebook, Linkedin and particularly Twitter. At first the commens moved off site, and then eventually the whole conversation. The bogs were still useful. They were a place for personal reflection or to elaborate an idea that was too big for a social media thread. Social media, coupled with an industy of thought leaders promoting their advisory services pushed the original blogging community to the fringes I think.

Entropy seems to be a constant.

During the life of this blog I have met several other bloggers and professionals and built some great and long lasting relationships.  BetterProjects has enabled me to crash at people's hourses that I have never met in three different continents, not to mention different cities in Australia. This entertains me to no end.  

People are awesome.

Over the years there have been over a dozen guest bloggers and temporary team members who have content published here next to mine. Some I stay in touch with, some are around but in the ether and some I have lost the details for. 

To my team mates and blogging colleagues here; Thank you.

My typing (and occaitionally spelling) has always been atrocious, and I rarely went back to correct minor mistakes.  Over the years, whether it is my four fingerred typing or the bluetooth keyboards, my typing has steadily gotten worse. Also HTML continues to remind me that two spces after a period is anachronistic.

Sorry for the lack of copy-editing.

What next for this site?  I still regularly search for and pull out content that I repurpose when sharing knowledge with others.  While some information here is still useful, some is now outdated and it is probably better for me to remove the site over going back and editing or removing posts.  I don't have the time or energy. (I suppose the Better Projects tidy up project could support a book project but, at best, that has to wait for another day.)  I'll be archiving the blog later in the year. I'll be able to find content, but it will be a private library of content for me.

Goodbye blog in August, the anniversay of the first post.

My time in the immediate future will be focused on growing a great company. If you're interested in Everest Engineering - come check us out at the website.  People particularly seem to like the team manifesto - the values and behaviours we try to live by.

Everest Engineering is a company where I get to try to nurture a great culture, and support people to do great work.  We are already over 100 strong and continue to grow. Our aspirations as to be, post pandemic, one of the world's most reputable techjnology businesses. We focus on services today and in time will also grow a suite of tools to help others as well.

Wherever Everst takes me I know it's going to be a hell of a ride.

And BetterProjects.net? I also think I will be repurposing this domain name, maybe in 2022 to be focused around "projects for good."  I am not sure what form that takes yet, but one idea I have is that people struggle to find the right opportunities to invest thier spare energy. I wonder if I can help with that.  We will see.

Anyway, thanks for reading. If you want to stay in touch... I guess Linkedin is the place to do it these days.

16 years isn't bad for a blog. We should throw a party.