One Year Down...

Today, Killswitch is celebrating the 1-year birthday of our blog Perspectives! Since its introduction, Perspectives has been our outlet for giving back to the communities we rely on. It has been a lot of fun sharing our thoughts and ideas with you, so be assured that we will continue delivering hot, fresh content on a weekly basis.

Over the last twelve months I have been asked a few times:

Why go to so much trouble to blog? Aren't you just giving away your trade secrets?

It's true that Perspectives is no money maker — obviously no one is paying to read these articles, and we certainly wouldn't want them to! So why do we continue to ask our entire staff at Killswitch to spend valuable man-hours writing?

And Many More

As I mentioned before, a big part of it is the importance of giving back to the communities that support our business. From a development standpoint, we solely use Open Source coding languages, libraries and programs, which means that these tools have been provided free of charge. In stark contrast to Microsoft tools like .NET which are supported internally and leased to developers, Open Source code is maintained by a community of volunteers who are concerned enough about the success of the industry to pitch in and help.

Every time I run into a bug while developing a Web app, my first inclination is to Google my issue and see if someone has already written a blog article with a fitting solution — and often times that works! Maintaining Perspectives with helpful tutorials and free downloadable code is our way of saying 'thank you' to the community and giving something back.

Keep It Coming

Perspectives is a place where we can show you a more candid, honest look at the people who make The Killswitch Collective what it is. This is our opportunity to express our passion for intuitive design, clever development and fruitful business relationships. We want to show our readers how we think, how we work through problems and how we strive to make the Web a better place.

With one year under our belts, we're just starting to get warmed up. Keep checking back each week for more articles about development, design and anything else we're thinking about. If you are new to Perspectives, here are a few tips to help get you started:

• Subscribe to Perspectives by adding this URL to your RSS reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/killswitchcollective/perspectives. Not using an RSS reader yet? Try Google Reader!
• Start following @KSCollective on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates about what we are working on and thinking about.
• Use the Category links in the sidebar to narrow down articles to topics that interest you (design, development, etc).
• Click on an author's picture at the bottom of their articles to read their other entries.
• Drop us a note, we'd love to answer any questions!