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Welcome to 2017!

Welcome to 2017!

2016 was quite the year for me, as I'm certain we all have our own "I survived 2016" stories. It was a good year on a whole, and I'm happy to share that 2017 is shaping up to be even better both personally and professionally.

One of my resolutions for the year is to get back into Content Creation, and get this site back on track of being a resource to my fellow enterprise application developers.

-- which leads me to the heart of this post, and two things you might have picked up in that last sentence: "get this site back on track" and, perhaps more telling, my use of "enterprise application developers" vs. something like "IBM Notes Domino developers".

I use this site, I'd imagine, how many of you do: if I need to do something that I can't bang out off the top of my head, I go to Google.

I think anyone who runs a website like this tell you, with a smile on their face and a concern that they're slowly losing their minds, that most of the time their own article covering exactly that topic shows up in those search results. Yes, running a website like this is better than having  a code repository of your Greatest Hits, as the article often gives you better context for the Why and not just the How that code snippets provide.

In 2016, I found this site less and less in those search results... which isn't that bad of a thing per se. I mean, don't get me wrong, I by no means think that I am the Grand Authoritative Master Of All Things, and knowing that I don't know everything about everything, I like reading tactics and strategies from various sources.

The problem however was when I needed something -- and often times it was something that I remember having done in 2013, 2014, or 2015 -- and not only did my site not come up in the search results, but no other results matched what I was trying to do.

There was a gap here, and it was a gap that I had created by not creating.

As for the second part of that statement... For many of my fellow developers, the IBM product portfolio has either been abandoned outright or left in-place while new application development efforts are being done on competitive winning platforms.

Is there still a place for "dominoGuru.com"? I asked that question quite often, both to myself and through social media. Social media feedback was much kinder than I was being to my contribution to the greater online community, to which I am both humbled and thankful.

In 2017, I plan on changing things up a bit.

I want to get back into content creation, both on this site and beyond. As such, keep an eye open for posts here and on social media on what crazy thing I'm trying out next.

I want to publish more articles, deep dive into more topics, and cover more of the trends and latest techniques that will affect (and ultimately help) enterprise application developers.

And I want to be able to Google "HTML5 offline webclip app sync localStorage to Web Services" and perhaps see this site in the results.

Will it be the same domain name? Not too sure (my constant searching for a new domain name has yet to yield what I consider promising results), but I think I'll always keep "dominoGuru.com".

To close out this post, I want to stress something that I touched on above: there was a gap. No matter how small or niche that gap was, there was a gap. So if you think you don't have anything to contribute, I can tell you - through a hard-learned lesson - that you are absolutely wrong. All it takes is you overcoming that anxiety that tells you "no one will read it" or "it won't help anyone" or the thousands of other things that keep you from getting started... because one day you'll be paging through Google search results working on a project when BAM, there's your post. And then two things will happen: you'll open that post and be either thrilled with rediscovery or dread at the way you coded years ago, and you'll wonder if you should visit a neurologist because you honestly can't remember ever writing about that topic in the first place!

Happy New Year!


About the author: Chris Toohey

Thought Leadership, Web & Mobile Application Development, Solutions Integration, Technical Writing & Mentoring

A published developer and webmaster of dominoGuru.com, Chris Toohey specializes in platform application development, solutions integration, and evangelism of platform capabilities and best practices.



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