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.

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.

(Pretty similar to Joel Spolsky actually. Both in quality of content and hateful feedback in return.)