This week marks the 10th anniversary of this little blog! It’s crazy to think a pet project that I took on during my last year as a postdoc is still going on after a decade of recording the work of our group in computational chemistry and it is also a happy coincidence that this year is the centennial anniversary of IUPAC and the sesquicentennial anniversary of the Periodic Table, for which 2019 has been designated as the International Year of the Periodic Table. I will release various posts celebrating this first decade of blogging and some regarding the IYPT2019 as soon as possible, also some major changes in layout and look are coming. It has been suggested to me that setting a patreon.com account could help me raise some funding for assisting underprivileged students but I’m not so sure yet.

By 2009 the chemistry blogosphere was already in full swing, so I got to it a bit late. (Is commenting ‘First!‘ still a thing?) At the time my job future seemed a bit uncertain, I had already spent two years as a postdoc in Romania and prior to that I worked for a private company in their research center here in Mexico so I started to ramble here so in upcoming job interviews I could point to a resource which gathered my thoughts and some achievements in a more informal fashion than a CV or a resume. (Plus, I like writing about things other than chemistry just for myself, maybe someday I’ll start a blog with some fiction writings I have here and there.) Quite frankly I didn’t think I could go back into academia so I was mainly looking for jobs in the R&D departments of various chemical companies, particularly in the field of coatings which was the one I already had some experience.

I never imagined this little blog would gain any attention, I think I had something like 2,000 views on the first year, now it’s up to 1,500 views a week! One of the first posts that gained popularity quite quickly dealt with the calculation of SCRF calculations and some parameters we were struggling to get right. Once I found the best parameters for running them, my boss, the late Prof. Dr. Ioan Silaghi-Dumitrescu at Babes-Bolyai University, asked me to email them to the group and post them physically in the lab so we wouldn’t loose them; I thought it would be a better idea to have them on the blog so we all could access them easily and at the same time share our findings with whomever had the same issues. Turned out that many people struggled with these parameters for SCRF calculations in Gaussian and from that moment on that became one of the underlying principles of the blog: “any problem we face in the lab is definitely faced by someone else, so lets share our solution”; the other principle of course was my blatant self promotion.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

One of the most rewarding aspects of having kept this blog going on for so long is knowing that it is a modest resource that some people has found helpful. Attending conferences and having people telling me they like my posts and have found help in them is extremely gratifying. Also, academically it has allowed me to meet wonderful people with whom I’ve established very interesting collaborations in various countries like Iran, US, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Chile, Bulgaria and many more.

Very early I started getting direct questions to specific problems and to the best of my abilities I’ve tried to answer them although I not always have the time to do so and for that I apologize to all the readers who didn’t get an answer; up until now keeping this blog has been a spare-time endeavor which not always gets the priority it deserves withing my academic tasks.

Thank you for reading, commenting and sharing these posts during this past decade! I truly appreciate it and it has been very important to me; I sometimes feel the posts go into the void but every now and then I’m approached by readers who have found the blog helpful and that is very rewarding. Here’s to ten more years!