Thinking Parallel

Exactly one year ago, the first post on this blog went live. I don’t want to bore you with yet another review of the times passed, but nevertheless have some announcements to make with regards to this site. And of course, if you decide to not read this article because you don’t like announcements for some reason, there is still one thing I want you to know: thanks for being here and reading this :smile:!

First of all, I have finally gotten around to finishing a first cut of my Recommended Books on Parallel Programming page. It contains the books I like best on the systems I use the most. Hope it helps someone, as it should answer quite a few questions I am frequently asked.

Second I have signed up with Jobamatic for a Job Board. It can be found at http://jobs.thinkingparallel.com (who would have thought of that ;-)) or in the sidebar of this blog, where it will show the newest offers as well. This is an experiment at this point, so please let me know if you find it useful! Of course it will be even more useful as soon as companies start filling the board with jobs targeted at exactly this audience, therefore I have put up an introductory offer of $25 per posting for 60 days. Jobamatic will fill the board with even more relevant jobs for our niche even if no companies sign up, so I hope this is useful for you in any case. The top jobs are also displayed in the sidebar for anyone to see.

Hmm, what else? Statistics, maybe? Everybody loves statistics, so I will give you some. This blog has more than a thousand subscribers via RSS by now. If you are not one of them, it would be a good time to change that now, as I am using my subscriber count as my primary measure of success :-). Second, the page views. I get about 200 page views a day at the moment (more on the days that I actually post, less on weekends). This is nothing compared to the big sites, but since I only post once a week this is not surprising at all to me. It is steadily increasing anyways without me having to do anything (except continue posting, of course). And finally some demographics: about 50% of my readers are from the US (a number I find surprisingly high), about 30% from Europe and less than 10% from Asia (this I find quite low – aren’t all the software developers supposed to be sitting in India or China now?? Maybe thats a myth after all…).

On another topic, some people have asked for a forum on this site. Although this is technically possible now that I have moved this blog to a new webhosting provider (Hostgator – the old one was getting sloooow and as most of my visitors are from the US anyways, it makes sense to move this blog close to them), I have decided to defer that until later. A forum needs even more people than a blog to be alive and since I don’t have the time to moderate it at the moment, it will have to wait. But if you think this is a good idea, make sure to keep on bugging me about it. And while you are at it, make sure to mention whether or not you would also help moderating it :smile:!

I also have a few personal announcements coming up with regards to my personal situation (finishing my PhD., signing on with a new employer and stuff like that), but its too early to talk about this (yet).

Therefore I will finish this post by saying a big *thank you* to all of you who have commented on this blog or supported me in any other way during the past year, I have learned a lot from you and sincerely hope at least some of you can say the same about yourselves! Thanks for being here and listening. And now back to our regular schedule, where we will finally talk about some serious parallel programming stuff again next week 😀 – and I can tell you I have finally gotten around to producing some exiting, content rich posts that I had intended to write for a long time!