Four years ago, Lars posted our first article on software freedom. This started an epic effort to help educate those who want to get into free-software. We pledged to discuss technical topics such as shell and C, and non-technical topics such as diversity and motivation. Through our time we've had opinionated series on the truisms of software, or strong technical sets around topics such as systemd.

To give you some numbers, in the past four years we've published two hundred and eleven (or two hundred and twelve if you include this one) articles, by seven authors. Eighty-three were by Richard Maw, seventy-four (seventy-five) by yours truly, and forty-one by Lars Wirzenius. Our most prolific guest author was Will Holland who has contributed seven, Richard Ipsum and Jonathan Maw have contributed two each. Jon Dowland has contributed one, and one of our articles was deliberately anonymously posted one Christmas.

We've received thirty-eight comments spread over twenty-four of the articles. Our most prolific commenters have been Gravious and Richard Maw; otherwise they're spread relatively thinly among the approximately nineteen other commenters. More than fifteen of the thirty-eight comments were by authors, usually in response to comments on their articles.

We have six items in our suggestion-box (thank you) though some are us acknowledging comments. We're grateful for every suggestion and every bit of encouragement you've provided over the years, via the site, IRC, Twitter, etc.

Over the years, our core contributors have had their own ups and downs, and yet we've pretty much managed to get an article out every week no matter what. Indeed we missed one week (I believe) in all that time, and that was because we typoed the date in our publishing queue, and none of us caught it in review. Sadly, it gets harder and harder though, and so please do pop over to the suggestion box if there're topics you'd like to see us cover (even if you just want an expansion of something we've previously discussed). Perhaps come and join us in #yakking on the OFTC IRC network, and if you're feeling very enthusiastic then come and discuss guest-posting since we're always grateful for contributions.

Here's to another four years of articles which you consider worth reading…