2017 – The Year in Review Looking back at an exciting 2017

2017 was an incredibly fun, exciting and busy year for me. I’m a bit late in pulling it together but I wanted to write this year in review post.

2017 Highlights

For me there are a few distinct highlights that come to mind in a year packed full of goodness…

MVP Award

The biggest highlight by far was being nominated for, and later being presented a Microsoft MVP award. To say it was a dream come true would not be true, as I’d never even considered dreaming it before being nominated! I’m still getting used to the idea of joining such an amazing group of community leaders, experts and enthusiasts. My trophy sits pride of place on my desk at home and I often glance at it to reassure myself it actually happened!

Public Speaking

I kicked off my speaking “career”; first with some small internal talks at work, then a 20 minute public talk in April, next a talk at London .NET User Group and then two conferences. One in London for Progressive .NET, one in Germany at ADC Core! In January last year, I would have laughed at anyone that said that within the year I’d be volunteering to talk in front of a room full of people! I’m gaining my confidence, experience and most importantly enthusiasm to present more talks in 2018. I’m applying to conferences and planning new talks that I hope will benefit the community. I found a passion for sharing with the community and giving back, since I have personally learned a lot from other writers and speakers over the years.

OSS

I again managed to carve out some time to contribute to the Humanitarian Toolbox, allReady project. During 2017 I submitted 45 pull requests to the project, with 121 commits. Some of the biggest work involved migrating from 1.0 to 2.0 of ASP.NET Core. I’ve gotten more involved with helping plan and manage issues, answer questions and review pull requests. It’s a fantastic team and a project I love working on. I also created a little OSS library for basic correlation IDs on ASP.NET Core APIs. It was something we needed at work that I chucked together one weekend and published to NuGet. It’s had nearly 17,000 downloads!! I guess that number is skewed by CI systems and the like, but still way more than I imagined would ever pull it down! I completed a 2.0 upgrade for that project during the Christmas break which added a context concept that might be useful.

Meeting People

I got to meet some great people within the community, as well as forming friendships both online and off. As a naturally introvert and shy person, this hasn’t come easily but I’m building my own self confidence, the more I put myself out there. I got to meet a few people I never expected to meet in person which was a real bonus. Much of that has come from the two items above, contributing to allReady and starting to speak at conferences. In additional I’ve got to know many people via Twitter and enjoy being engaged with the community directly. I learn a lot from the blog posts and content shared via Twitter and rarely does a day pass without my flagging something to read later.

Twitter Growth

My Twitter follower count has grown dramatically this year. On the 10th of January 2017 I marked the milestone of reaching 100 followers with a tweet. By the close of the year I got close to 700 followers which seems incredible to me. I hope this is because my content is resonating with people and being deemed useful. Thanks to everyone who follows me and engaged with me in some way in 2017. Let’s make it at least 1,000 followers this year! That would be very cool!

Blogging

My blog has been a big focus for me in 2017. I published 45 posts during the year, which looking back is coming on for 1 per week on average. I really love writing for my blog and sharing what I’m learning. Much of the content is ASP.NET Core related, although Docker is featuring heavily too. I’ve started to try and write more soft-skills type posts as I develop myself personally and professionally. For example I wrote two long posts focused on my progress from hating public speaking, to actually really enjoying it. I enjoyed writing something a bit different and while they are long and probably not to everyone’s taste, I had some nice feedback. I’ll hopefully break down some shorter posts early in 2018. I’ve been honoured that a lot of my posts have been featured on the ASP.NET Community Standup by Jon Galloway. That’s certainly helped with reach. In terms of numbers, I’ve seen some impressive growth…

Headline Numbers:

• 117k unique visitors (up  242% on 2016)
• 185k sessions (up 268% on 2016)
• 233k page views (up 290% on 2016)

I’m not sure how that compares to other blogs, but I’m happy with that reach and the growth factor. I’d love to keep growing it in 2018 and will aim to keep up the flow of quality posts. I have many drafts from 2017 left partially worked on which I will pick up against soon!

I also took a quick look at my top 10 posts:

The project.json one got a lot of traffic not long after the announcement of it’s demise! Good to see Docker up there. Interesting that the how to send emails in 1.0 is so popular. Maybe I need to produce and update for 2.0 that covers the options we have now!

.NET Meetup

For a while I’d craved a local user group focused on hosting speakers for .NET related topics. I started attending Brighton ALT.NET early in 2017 which is a long running group hosted by Mike Hadlow. It’s a fun event and I enjoy attending, however it’s format is discussion based and I still wanted an option to see speakers present longer topics. This kept coming back to me during the year and by mid 2017 I started to seriously consider starting a meetup. However I was worried about how to go about it. Where would I even start? In the end I decided to simply bite the bullet and put one together. I created a .NET South East meetup account, agreed with Madgex, my employer, that I could kindly use their office space and got planning. It all came together quite quickly and we had our first event in August. The membership has exceeded my initial imagination and we get a good turnout of regulars. Our busiest night was when we arranged for an evening with Jon Galloway that packed the space we had with nearly 60 people. I’m so glad the community are getting behind the group and the feedback is always positive. Thanks to all of the speakers and attendees who’ve made it a reality. Thanks especially to some of the Madgex staff who have continually supported the logistics of the events. Big shout out to Chris Sargood in particular who’s helped me with every event.

Career

My career has progressed at Madgex and I enjoy every day working for them. I’ve got to work on some exciting greenfield technology, building our new reporting system using the latest tools. I learn a lot from working within such a great team of people. I was very happy to be promoted to senior developer during the year and towards the end of 2017 took on some extra responsibilities as a developer community lead. I’m excited about the goals of that role and look forward to working with everyone more closely in 2018.

Learning

I’m continuously learning and my personal view is that you have to proactively work at learning new things, consuming new ideas and experimenting all the time. I’ve learned a lot simply by working with new technology in my day job as well as a significant amount from contributing to Humanitarian Toolbox. I love developing and keeping up with the ASP.NET Core space in particular. I watch a lot of recorded conferences and online video content as primers on topics. I then seek blog posts to dive in a bit deeper. I spend a fair bit of time watching the notifications on the ASP.NET Core repositories and reading some of the code there which I find very useful. One of my best learning tools though has been to teach. I found that I learned so much from each and every blog post I put together. Speaking has taken me even deeper as well. I can’t recommend sharing content enough as a way to develop your skills and truly understand something. It’s a win-win!

Videos

Late in 2017 I started thinking about recording some YouTube videos. I’d been approached by a couple of online course providers about creating content, but honestly felt I needed some more experience first. In November I started experimenting and in December I recorded my first video about ASP.NET Core Startup, focusing specially on Program.cs. I was quite happy with the content for a first try, but the quality was not quite at the level I wanted, so I invested in some new equipment, including lighting and a proper microphone to hopefully take me to the next level. I’ve since managed one more video, this time about Dockerfile Basics and it’s an improvement over the first video. They’ve gained quite a lot of views (around 700 between them) in a short space of time which has encouraged me to put more time into this during 2018. It’s a lot of work though! I’d like to consider producing a formal course as well if I can find the time and some content that’s not already been covered!

Looking to 2018

I’ve been setting personal goals and noting down ideas for 2018 for the last month or so. Much of it is really to build on 2017. Keeping up blogging, doing more video content and hopefully speaking at more conferences. Overall it’s about being part of the community, earning my MVP wings and sharing what I can with others. Hopefully some of my crazier ideas will become a reality too. I’ll save those until they happen! A key thing I learned in 2017 is that anything is possible if you put the work in. I achieved far more than I would have written in a list at the beginning of the year!

Here’s some larger things on the list for 2018

• MVP Summit – This is the big one for me and will be my highlight of 2018 for sure. I’m all set to travel to the US for the first time to visit Microsoft HQ in Redmond. It’s an extremely exciting opportunity to meet fellow MVPs as well as interact with the Microsoft teams directly. I’m told it’s a very tiring and packed experience but so, so valuable.
• NDC London – In a week and half I’ll be attending NDC London. I’ve always wanted to go to an NDC conference in person. Last year I took part in a two day codeathon for Humanitarian Toolbox before the main conference but this year I get to pack in three days or learning and networking. I’m really looking forward to catching up with some people from the Twitter world as well as hopefully meeting a few “tech celebrities”!
• Humanitarian Toolbox codeathon – The day after NDC I’m very excited to have been able to organise a codeathon in Brighton. I’ll be joined by Richard Campbell to spend a day coding with developers from Madgex and the Brighton community. It’s going to be an exciting and hectic day. I love introducing new people to the allReady project though.
• Videos – I plan to spend more time recording in 2018 now that I have learned the basics. Why not subscribe to my channel to be notified of new content?
• Live Coding – I’d like to try some live coding in 2018. It’s an intimidating idea but I think it’s well worth trying. I’ve been watching Jeff Fritz do regular sessions and it’s very inspiring. I also think it’s extremely valuable to see someone code “for real” and not in an edited video. Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to learn from video training courses and it’s a big part of my learning pattern. The polished videos are great when you want to learn a topic. However, edited videos do tend to disguise the reality and the challenges of coding, obscuring the picture for junior developers which can lead to people feeling under skilled. I know I’ve left videos feeling like I’m not skilled enough, but those videos are likely shot multiple times and edited together to give that clean, slick impression. Live coding lets people see that we’re all human. We miss things, get stuck at what later seem like obvious blockers, make errors and forget stuff. I’m sure we all write sloppy or poorly crafted code at times! My plan would be to live code as I work on issues for Humanitarian Toolbox. The main problems is scheduling as I’m not sure I can easily commit to specific, regular days/times which does make it harder for people to join in live.
• Blogging – Lots more blogging in 2018 I hope. I want to continue some of the series I started in 2017 as well as finding new areas to explore and topics to cover.
• Speaking – I definitely want to do more talks in 2018 now that I’ve got my feet wet. I’m actively submitting to talks and developing ideas for a range of new topics. As well as conferences I hope to get to some of the UK meetup groups as well.
• Learning – As I said earlier, this is a continuous effort for me. You get out what you put in. I’ll be reading a lot of blogs and books, watching videos and hopefully attending some conferences. My particular focus is on the deeper internals of .NET and focusing on performance and bench marking. As ever I’ll dive off into any tangents the Twitter community provides!

Summary

So it”ll be a great 2018 I’m sure. Thanks to everyone I met, talked to or interacted with in 2017.