2021 in review

I know I'm a bit late, but happy new year everyone. It's time for another year in review post.

Pluralsight updates

In the last year I updated six of my Pluralsight courses to keep them up to date with the latest changes. The courses I updated were Azure Durable Functions Fundamentals, Implement Azure Functions AZ-204, Create Serverless Functions, Microsoft Azure Developer: Deploy and Manage Containers, Microservices Fundamentals, and Building Microservices. Of course, Azure is a constantly changing platform, so I expect that there will be more updates to follow this year.

Travel and conferences

It was another year of mostly working from home and attending virtual conferences. This year I gave several talks on microservices at various developer groups (sadly not available online), and I also spoke at the Audio Programmer meetup on the topic of "Is .NET Any Good for Audio?".

Microservices and Azure

My day job as an architect continues to focus a lot on Azure and microservices. Last year involved a lot of thinking about how best to implement multi-tenancy in the cloud, as well as more work on modernizing some legacy codebases, and moving more in a microservices direction which has proved valuable as the development team has grown significantly recently.

I mentioned last year that I wanted to explore the capabilities of Dapr and I was able build a number of prototypes that have helped me understand what it has to offer. I have to say I really like the concept behind Dapr and hopefully I'll be able to share some of the things I've learned on this blog later in the year.

I've also been introducing Azure Durable Functions into the projects I'm working on at every opportunity. In almost all the microservices I've worked on there are workflows that greatly benefit from the Durable Functions approach to orchestration.

Moving house

Probably the biggest thing for me personally this year was moving house. We'd been in our old house for almost 20 years so it was a big upheaval to move, and meant that my time for blogging, open source and conferences was fairly limited. The great news for me is that I now finally have my own dedicated office rather than having to do all my Pluralsight recording in the bedroom.

Music and audio

For the second year in a row I've been mostly working from home which has the nice benefit of meaning that my instruments are always close at hand, meaning that I could use my lunch breaks for practicing. This year I've been trying to level up a bit on my music theory with some jazz/gospel chord progressions and extensions finally beginning to make sense!

I was able to launch a new version of NAudio this year with improved .NET Core support, but really my days of doing audio programming on .NET are over, and I'm on the lookout for anyone who'd like to take the project over. Let me know if you'd be interested.

Plans for 2022

Once again it's hard to predict what the new year will hold, but a few things that I suspect will be involved include some more Pluralsight course updates (as well as hopefully a new course - I'll keep you posted!), and more talking at user groups on topics around Microservices, Azure Functions and Dapr. Let me know if you'd like me to speak at your event and I'll see what I can do.

I've also been considering recording a short series of podcast episodes on some of the development and architectural topics. A lot of my blog ideas are on the kinds of topics that it would probably be easier to talk about than write about.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has followed my blog, watched my courses and talks in the last year. I hope you have a happy and healthy 2022.