Stephen Walther

I've been reading Stephen's blog for nearly a year now and what strikes me is the level that he pitches at. It's never patronising and it's certainly never a soap-box from which to shout about how clever he is. When you want to learn a new advanced topic such as using mocks in TDD or the new ASP.NET MVC implementation, Stephen's posts are invaluable. Even if you know a topic quite well, it's worth reading what he has to say on it as you might not be as clever as you think. :-)

There's a tonne of information out there for newbies (Teach Yourself How To Be Raymond Chen in 14 Seconds etc) and quite a few excellent blogs for getting nicely deep into a topic (e.g. the force of nature that is Ayende), but Stephen has a knack of pitching all you need to know to get you from beginner into the latest brave new world.

This is much easier to explain with a graph so here's a whiteboardy sketch.

Stephen isn't completely alone here (just) and it's not to say that all of his posts are pitched at this level, but he is the most consistent.

It would be great if more people blogged at this level. I think I might make that my goal for future posts too.