Almost seven months ago I started this blog in English, a bit more than 6 months ago I landed in Wellington and a few days later I started working for Calcium.

And furthermore, in a month (actually a little bit less) I'm going back to Milano to enjoy the end of northern hemisphere's summer and hopefully to do some good climbing.

So it's time to draw a line and make some considerations about the past.

First let's speak about the Wellington .NET user group

My fellows in Italy knew that even before coming to NZ I was more for a decentralized user groups and not for a big national user group, and now, after attending to 6 events in 7 months, and going to a few geek-lunches I'm even more convinced of that: I prefer short meetings with less people, the possibility to drink a beer and eat a slice of pizza while talking to the developer evangelist from Microsoft (Darryl) or discuss with everybody about one particular topic. I really like this type of meetings. Maybe the top-down meetings are good for someone new to the technology, but I prefer discussing and exchanging opinions with like-minded developers.

And another nice meeting is the weekly lunch with geeks organized by Ivan: I think these discussions are more valuable than sitting all day long listening to big names presenting or "teaching" how to write ASP.NET applications or how to migrate from VB6 to .NET. We speak about architecture, we speak about agile methodology, about RoR approach, about human side of development, about Apple.

And what about New Zealand?

Just 2 words: relaxed and easygoing. Sometimes too much relaxed for what I was used in Italy. But in Wellington there is such a great nature and landscapes at no more than 15 min of drive from the CBD. You are living in such a great environment, why should you get angry for some job related problems?

The only real problem is that the houses are built as if they were in a tropical island, with thin plywood walls, not double glazing, not central heating: but they are not a tropical island, and here in Wellington in winter you get a damn cold wind straight from the South Pole, and the temperature can be as low as 2°or 3°C with 20-30 knots of wind (which makes a perceived temperature of -6°C). Last weekend, if I were in Milano, I'd have said: "Questa è aria da neve" which sounds like "This is wind of snow", but the wind chill doesn't bring snow, only cold, a lot of cold.

Now my blog

I'm pretty happy with it: only 7 months of life and already more than 300 RSS feed subscribers, an average of more than 200 unique visits and a bit less then 300 pages per day in the last month. Ok, nothing compared to the 62000 subscribers to codinghorror, or even to the 4000 of Phil Haack blog, but still a good result for a 7 months old blog.

Following Ayende formula (views*15 + agg views*10 + comments*35) here is the list of my top 15 posts:

The most popular, with almost twice the popularity rating of the second, is the post about the Ajax UpdatePanel that has been linked by ScottGu in his first "useful links" post.

The experience of these 7 months, even if I was far away from my wife, the Alps, my friends, my parents and Milano, is positive, and so I'm happy that last year I decided to quit my job to move to Wellington.

Now I've another month of cold winds, lunch with geeks, and then I'll enjoy the end of the summer in Italy.