The long form writing combined with an entertaining style and real experience to back up his stories made his stuff pretty unique in my opinion. Certainly among the best articles I have read on the net.<p>I think it was in a Stackoverflow podcast where he said that the hateful feedback he got was the main reason he stopped writing. It sad that we as a community did not get more of that content because of anonymous haters on the internet.<p>(Pretty similar to Joel Spolsky actually. Both in quality of content and hateful feedback in return.)