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Happy new year everyone. It's time for (yet) another year in review post. This year in some ways has felt like a slightly less productive year than normal in terms of blogging, speaking and creating courses. There's been several reasons for that.

One was that unfortunately I had a lot of back pain this year, which is still not completely gone and that certainly had an impact on what I was able to accomplish. Another was that a lot of what I've done in my day-job this year has been using AKS and Azure pipelines. And although I normally like to blog a about what I've learned how to do, a lot of the time I've not been completely sure I've done things in the best way, and so I've often felt like I'm not quite ready to write tutorials!

A more positive reason was that once again I have enjoyed devoting a bit more of my free time to music performance and production, which is one of my favourite hobbies - I played live 31 times in 2023 and managed to keep my habit of writing and recording one song a month going in an attempt to improve my skills. As much as I do enjoy creating programming related content, there can be a risk of burnout if you do too much of it, so I'm ensuring I make time for other creative pursuits as well.

I've also not published any new courses with Pluralsight this year, for the first time in many years. That was partly due to some internal restructuring going on at Pluralsight, but it is looking like I will be producing another course next year, so I will keep you updated on that.

Conferences

I am grateful to have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 7th year, which allowed me to once again attend (virtually) the MVP Summit. Obviously this year, AI was a major theme, and I have already had some opportunities to try out the Azure OpenAI service. It will be interesting to see what happens this year as developers try to work out how to make the best use of the power of AI whilst understanding where the limitations and risks of using it lie. It was also great to see the release of .NET 8 and I think .NET Aspire has potential to greatly improve the experience of developing cloud native services using .NET.

In August I had the privilege of attending the first ever Copenhagen Developers Festival, and spoke about audio in .NET. It was particularly great to be at a conference that made space for several talks about creative uses of technology (thanks especially to Dylan Beattie), and I hope to see that trend continue. I also was able to speak about Dapr at Developer South Coast earlier in the year.

Plans for 2024

This year, I'll be giving my audio talk again at NDC London as well as working towards another Pluralsight course. I've also been doing a bit more audio-related coding recently (although not in C#) and maybe some of that will eventually turn into articles on my blog when its ready to share.

As always, I'm very thankful for everyone who has helped and supported me this year, whether by watching my courses, reading my tutorials, attending talks or giving me feedback. I know that many of you had a particularly difficult year last year, and I hope that you have a safe and healthy 2024.