If you’ve ever looked into the field of O/R mappers and code generators for the .NET platform, chances are high that you’ve stumbled upon Frans’ popular tool LLBLGen Pro. With 6 years behind it, far longer than the average piece of software, LLBLGen Pro has grown to be one of the market leading tools for O/R mapping and has found it’s way into an impressive customer base.

Frans is the Senior Software Engineer at Solutions Design, a software company he founded in 1996 with the focus on database driven web-application development and the continued evolution of LLBLGen Pro.

He’s been blogging for the past 5½ years and 5 of those he’s been awarded the MVP reward for his community efforts.

What got you into blogging?

Mostly an urge to express my thoughts on software engineering principles and the material we've to work with. A blog is an excellent way to do that, as it's easier to write a blog entry than an article for a magazine.

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

There's still so much left to talk about :)

What profile do you try and give your blog?

Down-to-earth, no nonsense thoughts about software engineering principles and tools.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

Not much, as in: I'm not doing my work differently because I write on my blog. Reading blogs from others obviously has influenced my way of thinking.

How has blogging affected the developer community?

For the people who have great interest in what others have to say, how they can get better etc., so in general the people who regularly visit conferences like Tech Ed and local user group meetings, who read software engineering magazines and articles: it has changed the community, as it has made the community bigger I think: everybody can start a blog and start contributing.

However, the majority of the developers aren't reading blogs, magazines and aren't visiting user group meetings. So I think the real influence is really minor because of that.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

If a software company has made it mandatory for developers to write blogs for internal feeds, it has influenced them to be more able to share knowledge and information. To the outside world, I don't think a lot has changed. Sure, some bloggers seem to have some influence on for example some decisions Microsoft is making, but frankly I think that's just PR.

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

Employers should encourage their developers at least to read blogs. After that, developers should be encouraged to write about the things they learned on internal blogs so colleagues can learn from that and knowledge is shared.

I don't see why employers should encourage developers to write blogs for the outside world, and this might sound a little weird. The thing is that the employer is paying the developer to do work, not to write blog posts for non-employees.

A developer who writes blogs for everyone to read should be careful what's written: it can be great PR for the company, and for the developer, but it can also be very bad PR and can hurt the company the developer works for. So a developer writing blogs should always be aware of that.

So for a company it's not that logical to have every developer write blogs for the outside world, as not every developer is capable of writing blogs which are good PR and good value for the company.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Blogging is an easy way to write articles without having to wait till an editor of a magazine approves it: you can fire up the blog editor, type in your thought, hit post and it's done. I don't think that will change much. What will change is that to start a blog which is read by many people will be more difficult because there are so many bloggers out there.

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

I've worked on one project for 6 years now (LLBLGen Pro) and blogging has helped getting it in the picture, to tell the world about it. Others writing blogs about my work has helped us as well, and in that light it has helped us a great deal.

A great big thank you to Frans for taking the time to answer my questions even though, I know, his work keeps him more than busy. Please visit his blog where you’ll find more than one post that will catch your attention!

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here.