Geeks with Blogs was one of the original homes for developers on the web. It went live in October 2003, long before every engineer had a newsletter or a personal site, and gave thousands of developers a place to write about the code they were shipping, the bugs they were chasing, and the technology they were excited about. For a whole generation of .NET and enterprise developers, it was the community you blogged on — it grew to nearly 4,000 bloggers and around 100,000 posts.
Where it came from
The site was created by Jeff Julian in 2003, running on the .Text blogging engine. His very first post, on October 8, was a simple welcome: free blog hosting for developers. A year later, in 2004, Jeff and John Alexander founded AJI Software — the name is short for Alexander & Julian Inc — the Kansas City Microsoft shop that Geeks with Blogs ran under for years, which is why the site carried an “An AJI Software Community” banner in its prime.
Jeff and Matt Watson go back a long way: they went to college together and worked together, and Matt was one of the very first bloggers on the site. Later that same day, he published what was really the first post with any teeth on Geeks with Blogs — a rant titled “Visual Basic 6… Yeah it sucks!” That set the tone for everything the community would become: working developers writing candidly about the tools they actually used.
Those posts mattered. A huge amount of the practical knowledge that developers relied on in the 2000s and 2010s lived on community sites like this one — real solutions to real problems, written by the people who actually hit them.
How it came to Matt
In 2012, Matt bought Geeks with Blogs from Jeff’s company and became its steward for the years that followed. By then it had grown into a sprawling community — thousands of bloggers, a wall of topic tags, and the graffiti logo the site still wears today. Over the years that followed the site faded, and a lot of that writing was at risk of disappearing for good.
Part of what killed it was bigger than any one site. The web shifted, and the developers who once shared a home here drifted off to host their own blogs on their own domains. The shared community that made the place special slowly emptied out, one self-hosted site at a time. In another timeline, Geeks with Blogs had the head start and the audience to become something like Medium — a single place where everyone published together. It could have been. It wasn’t.
Matt didn’t want the writing to disappear with it. Geeks with Blogs was part of his own story as an engineer and a founder, so he’s bringing it back — restoring the archive at its original URLs so the old posts keep working, and publishing new writing here again.
You’ll find Matt’s articles on building software, leading engineering teams, and starting companies, much of it drawn from his work at Full Scale and his Product Driven newsletter.
Open to new authors
Geeks with Blogs was always a community, not a personal blog, and that’s the spirit Matt wants to keep going forward. He’s open to new authors who want a home for their writing about software and technology. If that’s you, he’d love to hear from you.
Reach out to Matt on LinkedIn, or start by reading the latest posts and browsing the archive.