I look forward to writing this post each year; it’s by far the easiest one to write, and it provides me with an occasion to look back on previous years (2009, 2010, 2011). It’s entertaining - and shameful too - to see what kept me busy back then, which opinions I held, and which technologies and techniques are still relevant in the meanwhile. Anyways, here it goes.

The most read post this year, with 37.797 page views, is How a web application can download and store over 2GB without you even knowing it. I just ran this experiment again with the latest Chrome build, and apparently the Chrome team hasn’t addressed these concerns in the meanwhile; the browser still behaves exactly the same. I’m guessing usage stats might prove that it’s not worth the effort.

The second most read post, with 14.371 page views, is Learning: the Hacker Way. I still firmly stand by this one today. Passive learning can only take you so far; it’s crucial to supplement passive learning with a high volume of getting your hands dirty.

With 14.085 page views, Commuting: have you done the math? comes in third. Commuting wastes a good part of your life; optimizing your commute can significantly improve the quality of your average day. Readers shared some interesting experiences in the comments on this one.

Having 5.215 page views, the post Why I will always love RSS is the penultimate item in this list. This writing is basically a rant on how, although I somewhat understand the motivation behind public companies fencing their gardens, it is sad to see that even peers seem to advertise the death of RSS, while it’s RSS that has enabled me to follow my favorite sources of information without having to rely on others to tell me what to read, and without having to be connected the whole damn time.

With 1000 views less, making it the last item in the list, is the post HTML5 Offline Web applications as an afterthought in ASP.NET MVC. It was this post that landed me a paid article on InfoQ. I should revisit this topic again, I’m curious to see how many websites are already making use of this HTML5 super cache to improve performance, or to truly provide offline access.

Thank you for reading in 2012!