Review Policy

This site has been around for over 20 years, so it was only natural that I would write about stuff I purchased. Those pieces became popular enough that people started asking me to review things, and eventually I started getting review units/copies from vendors.

So I thought it would be a good idea to have a policy in place to make sure everyone is on the same page:

1. I don’t do paid reviews. I realize there is a fine line between getting “free” stuff to review and being paid to review it, but I’m not interested in crossing it–this site does not generate any form of income for me, and I’d like to keep it that way.
2. I only review things I have a personal interest in (i.e., things that I would ordinarily have an actual use for, learn from or would otherwise consider buying) or that would be interesting for the people I occasionally provide consulting services to.
3. I don’t do scripted reviews (i.e., there is no content placement, I write about the features I find important, etc.)
4. There are no editorial tweaks–vendors get to read my reviews at the same time as the general public.
5. I don’t participate in vendor affiliate programs–I’m OK with handing out discount codes or linking to the vendor’s site with a utm referral tag (so they can check attribution), but other than my usual (automatic) Amazon/AliExpress linking (which I started using for books decades ago and now do for electronics components), there are no other affiliate links on this site to ensure I don’t get any direct revenue from the reviews.
6. When applicable, scripts used for performance measurements and benchmarks will be published here or on GitHub.
7. Benchmarking will be focused on the aspects I value (although I will try to use standard tooling where appropriate).
8. I review what’s “in the box”, not what’s promised for future releases or what might be available in a future version.

I’m also open to reviewing books–I’ve done pre-publishing reviews in the past, and I’m always happy to read and review books on topics I’m interested in.

I have also recently started a YouTube channel called @TheTaoOfTech that I am slowly populating with videos that complement the content on this site. I will try to keep the same review policy there, although I might do some sponsored videos in the future (but I will always disclose that).

So if you have something you’d like me to review, please get in touch and we’ll take it from there.

Many people ask me about page views, statistics, Google rankings, etc. This is what I have to say about it:

• This site does not use Google Analytics for privacy reasons, nor any other mainstream analytics or tracking platform. The flip side of that is that it is (incorrectly) down-ranked in just about every single public site ranking.
• It does, however, use Cloudflare Analytics, which is privacy-preserving and a more accurate than most other tracking sites because it automatically filters out bots, referrer spam and other things that contribute to site traffic inflation. However, it can provide some interesting figures (updated for August 2024):
  • Over 2M monthly pageviews (and steadily rising).
  • Over 110K unique human visitors per month, mostly from the US, UK, Germany, and Singapore (if I add in figures from Japan and Australia, I get almost as much traffic from APAC than from the UK, which has always been interesting to me).

You can check this PDF for a sample Cloudflare traffic report.

This audience reach comes down to four main factors:

• My emphasis on consistently solid technical content–which ensures continued reader interest.
• No fake audience engagement on site (I interact with readers directly via e-mail correspondence)
• Posts are automatically broadcast to X/Twitter, Mastodon and a few sites that consume my RSS feed directly.
• I get a lot of traffic from places like Reddit, Hacker News, etc. (especially when I post something with an unusual technical angle).

All of my posts are automatically broadcast to my X/Twitter and Mastodon accounts, and I also post occasional links to my LinkedIn profile.

I am also (slowly) starting to produce YouTube videos. This will be a slow process, as I am not a professional video editor and I have no intention of becoming one. I will, however, try to produce some videos that complement the content on this site, and am curious to explore the medium a bit more (and not just in Youtube).

Links to all my social and video accounts can be found on the site footer.

This is a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve reviewed in the past: