About

I have always wondered who reads about pages for websites. I thought it would mostly be automated web scrapers, people bored at work, or people sitting on the toilet who are used to being stuck in an endless loop of doom-scrolling, and found a brief respite from the algorithm. There are a rare few netizens who like the cut of your digital jib however, and wish to learn more. To you who are here out of genuine interest, I salute you, and welcome you to hear my story.

The History of Illumonos

Cast your mind back to February 2021. The disruption caused by the worldwide lockdown had no end in sight, and unlike others who:

  • Took up jogging
  • Baked copious amounts of bread
  • Slayed monsters in the Witcher 3 game, with all-red mutagens maxed out like a boss!
  • Danced along with their favourite celebrity on social media

I decided instead that I would join the cool club 😉, and build myself a CMS API.

Therefore, I laboured days and nights until I had a working CMS API. It had all the bells and whistles you would expect from a developer who had lots of free time, and a passion to develop the project the right way. Think maximum overkill 🤓. Yuh! it had everything, including the kitchen sink and then some!

The fate of the CMS project followed that of so many projects I had undertaken before. It languished in my GitHub, looking all sad and lonely, and desperate to be used. Sadly it was not to be.

Life moved on, and in the middle of 2024 I had an epiphany. I wanted to be an educator. Now I do not mean the stuffy old teacher who has elbow patches, a dry delivery, and bores everyone to death in their CS1001 module in University. I'm talking about an educator who inspires a thirst to know more. An educator who lays out their content in a fashion which can be absorbed with ease. That was the kind of educator I wanted to be. I knew I was suited to this role, as in my day job I find the most meaning in mentoring others in good software practice.

Following that epiphany, I knew the subject I wanted to impart my knowledge on immediately, and that was C#. As of writing this, I'm coming up to ten years working professionally with C# and the .NET Framework. I have been fortunate enough to work in a wide variety of software projects as a developer and tech lead, with some fantastic engineers, and now it is my turn to give back.

Falling into the trap that all software developers can relate to, I decided to roll my own education site. That is everything from the CMS backend, web frontend, backstage server, CDN server, you name it. One of the advantages of having so many projects in my own personal GitHub graveyard over the years, was that if I required a service, I usually had an almost working version sat on a shelf that had taken my fancy at one time or another. That meant I could use those projects to bootstrap myself to a fully working education powerhouse of a website. The result of all of those experiments and fancies would become Illumonos.

It has taken eight months of finding snatches of time on random nights here and there, in addition to being a new father, with all the time that it takes up, to bring forth my vision. It's my MVP you are reading now. Sometimes you have to release your project out into the world in a MVP state or you will never do it. My GitHub project backlog has 5 more phases planned, each with cool features to enhance Illumonos.com, which I am itching to get started on. Those phases are for another day though. For now let's teach!

The purpose of Illumonos

Illumonos will contain educational content for C# and the .NET Framework out of the gate. We want to help those who are just entering the C# sphere, to those who consider themselves veterans.

Whether you are on either side of the experience spectrum with C# and .NET, we will have useful and informative content for you.

As the website grows, we will add more community features and I am toying with the idea of video courses, for those who prefer visual and audio learning. For now though, we will be concentrating on filling out the website with the best hand-crafted written C# and .NET Framework content we can muster.

Thinking longer term, as one does, I would like to add more content creators on board, and expand Illumonos to cover other programming languages, whilst keeping the same ethos of quality and value in what we produce.

Furthermore, you may have noticed we switched to we instead of i. That's because I will not be alone in writing content for Illumonos. Whilst I will start out on my own, I have a strong cohort of like-minded friends who wish to contribute down-the-line. It takes a village, or so the expression goes.

The promises of Illumonos

Unlike some other websites, we have no interest in putting out thin, cookie-cutter content to farm SEO or advertisement clicks.

Content on Illumonos will only be published after it meets the following criteria:

  • Content will be structured to deliver maximum value, depth, and quality to our readers
  • Articles will be as concise as possible, whilst retaining their educational theme.
  • Use of graphics, titles, and images, will be clear and appropriate for the content
  • No fluff or padding will be added to articles for SEO purposes or to make more space for advertisements
  • Clickbait will be off-limits
  • Source code links to GitHub will be provided for each article where possible

As you can see from our criteria, we wish to provide you with the best content we can come up with. We're not here for some quick ad revenue. We are here to give back to the community, and provide useful educational content. If we ever feel like an article is not meeting our criteria, we'll pull it back and revise it until it does. That's what good programmers do with their code, and we'll bring that mindset across to our educational content.

For those who have made it this far, we truly hope you enjoy Illumonos. It is after all, for you. If we can make the educational experience of at least one of our community friends better, we have succeeded.

Happy reading!