Best of 2023

08 Jan 2024 #writing

In 2023, I realized that I’ve been blogging for five years. I started this blog to keep some notes online. Since then, I’ve used my blog to share my learned lessons, answer questions, and rant out loud. I consider my blog as my time capsule.

Last year, I wrote 23 posts. I tried to write one post every other week.

I wrote a series of posts about NullReferenceException, “the billion dollar mistake,” and expanded it into a mini-course on Educative.

I updated my ASP.NET posts to use .NET 6.0, the most recent LTS version the last year.

In one of my client’s projects, I worked with ORMLite. I wrote about pasing a datatable as parameter and joining to subqueries. I was too lazy to write SQL queries by hand for those two edge cases. Also, I shared five lessons I learned while working with ORMLite.

I got an interesting question through my contact page. I could shared my advice on how to start an ultralearning project.

Five posts you read the most

These are the five posts I wrote in 2023 you read the most. In case you missed any of them, here they are:

1. Goodbye, NullReferenceException: What it is and how to avoid it.
2. Goodbye, NullReferenceException: Option and LINQ.
3. Goodbye, NullReferenceException: Nullable Operators and References.
4. Too many layers: My take on Queries and Layers. While working with one of my clients, I had to write a lot of response objects and mapping methods to implement read-only API endpoints. This post contains my thoughts on taking layering to the extreme.
5. Goodbye, NullReferenceException: Separate State in Separate Objects. This is how to apply the “make illegal state unrepresentable” mantra to avoid the NullReferenceException.

Last year, I continued working as an independent contractor and content writer. I continued writing for NCache official blog. I started offering onsite courses and training in my city. Unfortunately, I saw a lot of coworkers being laid off. I hope they all had found “greener pastures.”

Voilà! That’s my 2023 in review and your five favorite posts. I hope you enjoyed them as much as I did writing them.

If any of my posts have helped you and you want to support my work, check my courses on Educative, download my ebooks and buy me a coffee on my Gumroad page.

Don’t miss my best of 2021 and best of 2022.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding in 2024!