365 days ago today I sent emails to Tom Miller, Jason Olson and David Weller telling them about TheZBuffer. I put a news item up on GameDev about my interview with KoiosWorks and stood back to see what happened. I had 2500 hits the first day which turns out to be one of only a few 2000+ days I have had.

The first post was actually posted on October 8th but since there is nothing worse than visiting a blog with a handful of posts I chose not to 'launch' until I had some content. I had met Marshall from KoiosWorks at a game development class I did at the University of Washington. When I heard he was working on a Managed DirectX game I arranged the interview and the launch date was set.

I had registered TheZBuffer.com back in August 2002 though as I have previously stated I can't remember what my intention was at the time. I hadn't even started my game development class but I'm sure I thought that I was going to do something spectacular :-) After I finished the class I realised that though I had a shiny certificate it really wasn't going to help me get a job as much as I hoped. The biggest blocker was that jobs at the salary I wanted required 3-4 years of C++ and shipped games - I have many years of coding, but almost none of it in C++. I could take a pay cut but that didn't appeal to me so I went back to tinkering in my spare time and doing my real job. In October 2003 Seattle Sputnik had a .Net and gaming talk that was to become my epiphany. Now I could use .Net languages for DirectX. I had been using them for as long as they existed and VB from VB3 onwards. I started looking around for information and other than Tom's blog there was precious little so I started collecting links. Eventually it dawned on me that nobody else was going to to put a site together, and since I had a cool URL all paid for I started building the site in Summer 2004. Initially it was just a page of links for my own use but by October I had started to realise it was getting out of hand so I added some structure and eventually put the content in a database. The site has been running on .Net 2.0 since long before Microsoft had an official go live license (one of the perks of being a Microsoft employee) though I couldn't talk much about it for the same reason.

So here we are 12 months later and as a result I've got new friends around the world, spoken at conferences, written for MSDN and best/worst of all quit a well paid job on a (calculated) whim. The 318 posts have had over 250,000 page views from over 50,000 distinct IP addresses and monthly traffic is growing nicely. So in the great British birthday tradition drink a pint for me tonight and look forward to the next year.