Mike Parker has done a fantastic job with the D blog: I really like the unique direction he's taken, focusing on D users and their first-hand experiences.  It is what I tried to do with my interviews that ran in the newsletter, and he's taken it to another level.  Compare other recent compiled languages' blogs and nobody else is doing this (you could argue they don't need to because they have more traction, but I suspect they underrate its importance):

https://blog.rust-lang.org
https://swift.org/blog/
https://blog.golang.org

Looking at their blogs, they mostly consist of release announcements along with a few longer technical articles, some examples of the latter:

https://swift.org/blog/whole-module-optimizations/
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/09/08/incremental.html
https://blog.golang.org/constants

We're missing these tech posts on the D blog, these are the few I found:

https://dlang.org/blog/2016/06/16/find-was-too-damn-slow-so-we-fixed-it/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/09/28/how-to-write-trusted-code-in-d/
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/11/07/big-performance-improvement-for-std-regex/

They're all good examples of what we need more of, though the regex one could stand to be longer (or at least the first of a series of posts).  That long technical article about std.algorithm.find was the third most-liked post from the blog in the last year on reddit, which surprised me:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/dlang.org/top/?sort=top&t=year

D is really trying to do things differently in many ways, we need writers to lay out how.  Andrei or someone else familiar with it should write an article about std.algorithm and how it works and why it's better.  Walter, Kenji, or Daniel should write an article on why the dmd frontend is so fast, ie all the technical decisions that make it so.

Dmitry should write a version of his std.regex talk at DConf 2014, laying out why std.regex is so fast while being so compact, updated for today (he had some great answers along this vein when I interviewed him last summer, would love to read the longer version - http://arsdnet.net/this-week-in-d/jun-28.html).  Robert Schadek should write about std.logger and what it took to finally ship it.  Jonathan Davis should write about the massive std.datetime and some of the key technical decisions that went into it.  These posts could even be repurposed for the docs, either copy-pasted or linked from there.

I know why this doesn't happen: these articles take more time and effort than a couple hours answering questions over email.  But for major selling points of D, it needs to be done.  Ideally, the article would be written by the technical author, as they know the code best, but it doesn't have to be.

As for announcements, it's time to move the newsletter to the blog, there's no reason to keep them separate.

On 2016-11-20 12:21, Joakim wrote:
> Mike Parker has done a fantastic job with the D blog: I really like the
> unique direction he's taken, focusing on D users and their first-hand
> experiences.  It is what I tried to do with my interviews that ran in
> the newsletter, and he's taken it to another level.  Compare other
> recent compiled languages' blogs and nobody else is doing this (you
> could argue they don't need to because they have more traction, but I
> suspect they underrate its importance):
>
> https://blog.rust-lang.org
> https://swift.org/blog/
> https://blog.golang.org
>
> Looking at their blogs, they mostly consist of release announcements
> along with a few longer technical articles, some examples of the latter:

I think the original Apple Swift blog [1] is more interesting and contains other articles the announcements as well.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Sunday, 20 November 2016 at 11:21:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Mike Parker has done a fantastic job with the D blog: I really like the unique direction he's taken, focusing on D users and their first-hand experiences.

Thanks! And thanks for writing this post.


> We're missing these tech posts on the D blog

I put out a call here for more technical oriented articles a couple of weeks ago. It did generate a bit of response, but it's all of the 'when I have time' variety, which I fully understand. For someone who is not a writer, such posts require a not insignificant chunk of time from the normal routine.

>
> I know why this doesn't happen: these articles take more time and effort than a couple hours answering questions over email.  But for major selling points of D, it needs to be done.  Ideally, the article would be written by the technical author, as they know the code best, but it doesn't have to be.

For what it's worth, Walter and Andrei have each committed to a post for some point in the near future. I expect to have them published before the end of the year. I've also tentatively got a couple of compiler-related posts from a couple of others in the pipeline, but I can't guarantee when they will get to me.

And, for anyone reading this, it's not just article proposals I'm after. Suggestions pointing me to potential articles are just as good. I can find projects and companies using D just fine, so I don't need help there. What I need is for people who notice some technically interesting use of D to solve a challenge to contact me and let me know who to approach about a potential post. The 'find' post came because Andrei linked me up with Andreas. The '@trusted' article happened because Steven was already planning a post on the topic for his own blog when I contacted him. The regex post came because I remembered Dmitry posting in the forums about some big performance gains back in May.

I'm sure I can find material if I look hard enough, but it's time consuming. In complete sympathy with those who have delayed their contributions to the blog, I don't have that kind of time right now. Help is always appreciated.