Ten Years of dspGuru

Well, dspGuru will be ten years old in a few days. It hardly seems possible. It's interesting to look back on how it turned out relative to what I was hoping for when I launched it. dspGuru has mostly been a success. At the most basic level, it scratched an itch that I had - and still have - to spread the gospel of DSP. Of all the missions one might adopt to make the world a better place, helping folks learn DSP pales in comparison to ending polio and squashing sugar ants. But we all need a mission.

I've learned a few things in the process of creating dspGuru. First, building a complex web site is a lot of work. In fact, I eventually came to think of web publishing as a form of slavery. The only thing that makes such slavery legal is that it's self-imposed. Silly me.

Next, I learned that the person who starts the thing does most of the work. It seems obvious in retrospect, but I didn't realize it at the time. In fact, I've come to understand this as a general principle. So, next time you see your son's baseball coach, Scoutmaster, or anybody else who's volunteered to be in charge of anything, thank them not just for their leadership but for doing most of the work.

But now that I've whined about all that, I should note that I received lots of fantastic contributions to dspGuru from other folks. Chief among those are Rick Lyons and Matt Donadio. I also received some great "DSP Tricks" from various folks who hang out (or hung out) in the "comp.dsp" newsgroup. Together, we've created a collection of DSP material that is among the most highly rated - by Google, at least - on the Internet. (BTW, if you get an urge to link to dspGuru, I don't mind.)

Although dspGuru was created mostly to scratch an itch, I also launched it as a business venture, hoping to do well by doing good. When I launched dspGuru, I remember that one idealistic young lad in comp.dsp was concerned that the contributions made to dspGuru by the good folks at comp.dsp would somehow become too commercialized in the process. I was a little concerned about that too, so I was determined to find a balance. However, I think most people realized that dspGuru was intended to be both an itch-scratching and a business - why not both?

As it turned out, though, I never really did much with the business angle. In fact, the only source of revenue dspGuru has ever had is the little kickbacks I received by foisting Amazon onto people who might want to buy a DSP book. That pays the web rent, but not much more. Worse, in Amazon's sudden zeal to become profitable several years ago, they drastically cut the kickbacks. So, even though it's barely worth doing anymore, if you like dspGuru and would like to support it, please consider letting me foist Amazon on you.

The other source of revenue results from encouraging folks to buy ScopeFIR, which is the primary product sold by my little company, Iowegian International Corporation. It's hard to quantify how much that brings in, but it undoubtedly helps. (BTW, did I mention that my little company, Iowegian International Corporation, sells ScopeFIR?)

As those of you who've used dspGuru over the years may have noticed, it hadn't changed much over the years. I would have liked to have developed it more, but once the itch got scratched a little, I had to focus my time on other things. More recently, though, I've gotten a bit of the itch back. I'm currently in the process of re-hosting dspGuru on a "content management system" (CMS) - which is both a lot of fun and a lot of work. Soon to become slavery.

Fortunately, the fundamentals of DSP don't much change, so the new dspGuru will start off with much of the same content that's been helping people learn DSP for the past ten years. However, I plan to freshen it up with a new look and feel, some reorganization, by fixing a lot of bad links, by having a lot of new features (heck, even blogging!) and by adding new content. I hope to create some new material myself. (Yup, I've got lots of ideas for more of my famous DSP FAQs.) And of course, I'm going to try to attract some new contributions. In fact, I've already hit up Rick Lyons, poor guy.

So, check back in at dspGuru every now and then to see how it's doing. If you like it, tell your friends. Better yet, don't tell your friends but link to it from your web site or blog. It makes Google happy. It's the right thing to do.

And ten years from now, let's get together again and see how it turned out.

=g2