Believe it or not, today marks the 20th anniversary of my blog. Exactly on February 13th, 2004, I've published my first entry, which is still online: "Nareszcie w Sieci". It was Friday 13th, but I said there that I don't believe in bad luck, and apparently I was right. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to look back and to write a few words about this website.
This wasn't my first or last venture on the Internet. Even before I launched this page, together with my friends from the neighborhood in my home town Częstochowa, still as teenagers, we formed a group that we called "ProgrameX". We had a website where we published various applications, games, articles, and art. We even created and shared custom Windows cursors and screensavers. I mentioned it in my past article: "Internet in Poland - My History". By the way, we all ended up earning M.Sc. degrees in computer science and now work in the IT field. Greetings to Grzesiek, Damian, and Tomek! I was also actively involved in the Polish Internet game developers community known as "Warsztat" (eng. "Workshop"), and over the years I became a moderator and then an administrator of it. That website doesn't exist anymore. Its last address was warsztat.gd.
At first, I was blogging in Polish, as I didn't feel confident writing in English. Only in June 2009 I officially switched to English. Over these 20 years, I gathered more than a thousand of entries. This one is 1168th. I know I could be ashamed of the old ones and I should remove them, their links and images probably don't work any more, but I still keep them, because I think some of them may provide useful knowledge. I like educating people and I know there are always more beginners than advanced programmers in each area, so what now seems obvious to me may be an interesting and new finding for someone else. I've only included a disclaimer for older entries, acknowledging that they may not reflect my current knowledge and beliefs.
While I may not consider myself particularly creative or spontaneous, persistence is a skill I possess. I can work towards my goals step after step and I don't get bored too quickly. Maybe this is why my favorite sport is working out at the gym and riding my bike, my favorite music genre is electronic music like psytrance, trance, and techno, my approach to money is passive investing, and after 20 years I'm still writing this blog.
When it comes to the technical side of this page, I don't use any CMS like Wordpress. While I'm not a proficient web developer, I've written all the scripts myself using PHP and MySQL. The page is still running pretty much the same scripts with small modifications. In August 2017, I familiarized myself with "responsive design" and implemented changes to the page and its CSS stylesheet to improve readability on mobile devices. Until October 2019, the page was not even utilizing the UTF-8 character set! Instead, it relied on the one-byte ISO-8859-2 code page, historically used for diacritic characters in Central and Eastern European languages. Just last week, I upgraded the scripts from PHP 5 to 8 and configured MySQL to accept any Unicode characters like emoticons 😀
My website has always been and remains completely non-commercial. I never intended to make money from it. Quite the opposite - I need to cover annual expenses for hosting and for the "asawicki.info" domain. Occasionally, I receive offers for commercial collaboration, such as displaying advertisements on the website or publishing third-party content. I don't know which ones are legit and which ones are pure spam or scam, and I don't even care - I ignore or reject them all. On only a few occasions, I accepted offers for complimentary e-books or development tool licenses in exchange for publishing their reviews.
Because of this, I also don't check statistics about visits too often. Statistics for January 2024 show 24076 unique guests, 21728 visits, 91680 pages, and 304438 requests in that month, which means 777 guests, 701 visits, 2957 pages, and 9821 requests per day. Is it a significant amount? I'm not sure. I'm not a web developer or a SEO expert. I understand that the topics I cover on my blog are niche. I don't publish content solely to increase popularity. I don't delude myself into believing that I have a dedicated fan base following my website. I'm delighted if you visit the site occasionally or subscribe to my RSS feed, but I know that most visitors come here from a search engine like Google, looking for specific keywords. Unsurprisingly, the most visited pages include: "How to quickly convert MKV to MP4 file using VLC?" (although the method described may not be the most optimal) and "Car Physics for Games" by Marco Monster (an article that is not mine, which I mirrored due to the original URL becoming inactive) - not the most important ones, from my perspective. However, if someone searches for a specialized topic such as "sparse textures in Vulkan" or "how to scalarize a shader" and finds my blog useful, then I know it all makes sense. I work on entertainment (games, video) my entire life, I'm not going to find a cure for cancer, but educating developers, providing answers to their questions (whether needed for work or just for a hobby project) is one good thing I can do for others.
Speaking about the topics covered on this blog, I told myself from the very beginning that I will write exclusively about my professional interests listed at the top of the page: "programming, graphics, games, media, C++, Windows, Internet and more...". I never intended it to serve as a personal diary. Later, as my career advanced to the roles of "senior" and more recently "principal", I also promised myself to always stay close to the code on this blog and never switch to posting exclusively on some high-level, "visionary" ideas, like some veteran programmers do.
Over the past 20 years, many changes have occurred. When I started this blog, it was at the dawn of the "Web 2.0" era. Numerous websites still adhered to the old "Web 1.0" style, characterized by textured backgrounds and animated GIFs. There were many "portals" gathering people and knowledge around a specific topic. Personal blogs were a new thing. They allowed to have our own place in the virtual space, to become a content creator rather than just a consumer. Hosting custom websites or even entire servers was a norm. Only later, we witnessed the rise of social media platforms and the centralization of data and power in the hands of a few major corporations, such as Facebook, Google, and X (Twitter).
The content published on the Internet also changed its form. These days, I should probably post my articles on LinkedIn, have a YouTube channel, or record podcasts, rather than just publishing articles here. I'm seriously considering posting videos on YouTube, especially as I have some experience in public speaking, as well as recording and editing videos. Somehow, I still didn't start it yet. As one ages, time mysteriously passes faster, thus, I find it challenging to consistently post something at least once a month despite having a lengthy list of new topics to explore.
What will future bring? I don't know and I don't like to play a futurologist. I prefer to focus on "here and now". The recent surge in popularity of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, raises questions about the future transformation of the Internet. On one hand, they offer convenience by providing quick answers to specific queries. As my friend recently said, "the best thing about these AI services is that you can get an answer for how long to cook the porridge without opening an entire long article that describes where does the porridge come from and who was the first to cook it". On the other hand, scraping knowledge from websites like mine and serving it rephrased without crediting the author raises a concern about copyrights. Regardless of what lies ahead, I remain optimistic, as I believe the fields of graphics and games have a bright future.
