I’m so bad at celebrating BirchTree’s anniversaries, so this post on a Tuesday night 12 days after the actual anniversary is gonna have to do it this year.

At this point I have written at this site for over one quarter of my life, which is nuts. This doesn’t even count the 2004-2009 period where I started blogs and abandoned them after sometimes one terrible, terrible post! Seriously, they were bad, and if I thought that when I was a dumb 20 year old full of unearned confidence, I can’t imagine how bad it actually was.

Sadly, because I’m a tinkerer and a “let’s try all the platforms!” sort of person (see my Android endeavors to this very day) I don’t have all the things I’ve posted since October 17, 2010. The earliest post is the first one that ever got over 100 people to read it: Finish the Job (Because Nobody Cares What You’re “Going to Do”)

I finished that piece like so:

The trick is getting yourself to finish that last 10%. That’s where the magic happens; the part where you finish those little details that separate good work from great work. I have no tricks for how to get there; how you do that is completely up to you. Finishing is the difference between talking about what you want to do (which is interesting only to you) and showing off what you have done.

One of the great pleasures of working on a project like BirchTree is that I’m constantly in that last 10%. This site will never be “done” (well, I guess technically it inevitably will, but let’s not get too deep on that…) but I get to show you my work on a nearly daily basis.

Oh, and that project I was talking about in that post was a website called AltStock that I wrote to be kind like The Wirecutter but for iOS software. I built it on Squarespace and it was not amazing (although I stand by my app picks at the time). Shawn Blanc and company took that idea further and better with The Sweet Setup, which I just so happen to write at semi-regularly today, so it’s interesting how that all goes full circle.

Thank you so much for being a part of this with me!

Here’s to next year’s big one zero and many more 🍻