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Happy Christmas and happy new year! I know it's been a while since I last posted anything here, but thought I'd revive my tradition of writing another year in review post.

Pluralsight

Part of the reason for me not having as much time for blogging is that I created three new Pluralsight courses this year, bringing my total to 29.

First up was a course about refactoring and optimizing code with GitHub Copilot. Obviously 2025 has been the year where AI as firmly established itself as a day-to-day part of the developer experience, and it's an extremely fast-moving space. AI-assisted coding can be both incredibly impressive and incredibly frustrating. Impressive as it can often write in a few seconds what it would have taken hours or even days to write manually, but frustrating as it can often miss the point of what you're asking or make critical mistakes that cost you almost as much time as you saved. In my course I tried to focus on the basics of how to prompt the AI assistant well, to enable you to get as much benefit out of it as possible, without falling into the pitfall of losing control of your codebase and ending up with a vibe-coded mess.

Next up was two courses about microservices, which essentially replace and update my earlier Pluralsight courses on the same topic. Despite some recent pushback against microservices in the industry, it remains a valuable and important architectural approach, and the core principles of microservices are relevant whenever you're building a distributed application (which for a lot of us, is all the time).

The first microservice course was Microservices: Architectural Strategies and Techniques, which covers some of the key principles for designing scalable and modular microservice architectures and explores the value of service meshes and continuous delivery pipelines. And the second was Microservices: Building and Testing which focuses in more detail on topics like implementing the domain logic, as well as how to test and deploy microservices.

Carpal Tunnel Surgery

Another reason for my reduced blogging output this year was some health issues. I've been battling back pain for a few years, although this year a strict regime of daily stretches and exercises and much more use of a standing desk seems to have helped a lot, and I'm a lot better than I was. For any younger developers reading this, make sure you look after your back - it's frustratingly slow to recover once you've injured it!

I've also been having a lot of issues with hand numbness and finally had carpal tunnel surgery on my left hand (which was my worst) midway through the year. I was quite apprehensive about whether it would impact or even eliminate my ability to play guitar but I'm pleased to report that my strength and flexibility returned enough after a couple of months to continue playing as before. Thankfully my right hand isn't as bad, so I'm not in a rush to get that one done yet.

Music and Audio

As you may know, one of my favourite hobbies is playing and recording music, and this year even with a break for carpal tunnel surgery I managed to play guitar or piano live at 32 events, as well as participated in recording a live album which was a first for me.

I also continued my tradition of composing and writing one instrumental song a month (which I occasionally batch up into albums that you can find here on Spotify or Bandcamp or just listen to them as they come out on YouTube).

This Christmas I upgraded my long-serving Yamaha MODX 7 keyboard to the newer Yamaha MODX M7 which is a very nice upgrade with the new ANX audio engine, better AWM polyphony and an improved user interface. It's also interesting to me that we are seeing an increasing number of hardware synthesizers providing fully software versions of their sounds, meaning that you can much more easily transition between studio and live playing using the same sounds (Arturia's Astrolab series also does this).

In terms of guitar tech, I'm still very happy with my Line 6 Helix LT and IK Multimedia TONEX, which between them give me access to a very wide variety of tones and effects. Again it's a very fast-moving space, with many exciting new software and hardware products being released and we're also seeing machine learning take a much more prominent role in music production (a trend I expect to increase in 2026).

AI, .NET and Azure

My day job continues to revolve mostly around .NET and Azure, as well as increasingly incorporating various AI technologies (both in the development process and to power new functionality).

My work with Azure this year has been a lot less on learning about new services, and more on how to deliver excellent resilience, scalability, and performance. I hope to feed a lot of the lessons I've learned into upcoming Pluralsight courses and talks.

I'm also hoping to find more time this year to go deeper with Azure Container Apps and Dapr which both have a lot to offer to simplify the process of building and deploying microservices and distributed applications.

It's great to see that each new version of .NET manages to squeeze out more performance improvements, and this has meant I have never regretted choosing .NET as my main development platform. (Still hoping for discriminated unions in C# though!)

Of course, there was also a lot of AI this year. I am both an AI enthusiast and an AI skeptic - it has potential to be very helpful but also very harmful. A key skill for all developers is knowing when and how to use it effectively.

I did attempt the Advent of Code challenges again this year, forcing myself to do them without the help of AI. Sadly didn't manage to complete all the challenges due to time constraints, so I'd like to cycle back to the two I missed if I get a chance later in the year.

What's next?

As for what's in store for next year, there's a good chance that I'll be creating one or two additional Pluralsight courses, although that's not been confirmed yet.

I took a break from speaking at conferences when my back was at its worst, and haven't currently got any new talks planned, but maybe if things continue to go well this year I might consider taking that up again.

And I think this might be my final year as Microsoft MVP as I have not been able to contribute as much as I have in previous years. It's been a great privilege to be part of the MVP program for nearly 10 years now, so I'll take the opportunity to say a big thank you to the MVP organizers and the other MVPs for all they do to ensure that .NET developers get access to great learning resources.

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who has read this blog or watched my Pluralsight courses. I hope you've found them helpful and thanks for all the encouraging feedback.