Farewell to the guys from Rolla

Do you remember a decade-old site called 4 Guys From Rolla? I used to visit it a lot in the early days of my ASP.NET career. Around 2002, it was still fairly common to visit a site and look for information, instead of just searching for it.

But as we all know, Google’s algorithms improved with the speed of light and a few years later nobody bothered to visit sites anymore, as we simply googled for solutions to problems and subscribed to favorite sites by using RSS feeds. The need for browser bookmarks vanished overnight.

The last of the original “4 guys”, Scott Mitchell, recently left the site and wrote about his story in “I’ve Written My Last Article for 4GuysFromRolla”. It’s an interesting read about the crazy “dotcom” era and one passionate developer stuck in the middle of it.

A bunch of books we used to read a decade ago.

Update: The site still seems to be alive and kicking!