MVP Award and 10 Years of Blogging

I am very happy to announce that earlier this week I received the Microsoft MVP Award. It’s a real privilege and honour to be associated with such an awesome group of technical experts who share so much useful information with the community. It’s a little daunting in a way, since whenever I see the MVP logo by someone’s name, I take that as a sign they know what they’re talking about! So I hope I won’t let the team down!

I actually think it’s a great time to be a developer on the Microsoft platform at the moment. I’m a big fan of Azure and F#, the new Docker for Windows capabilities look awesome, and though the launch of .NET Core has not been as smooth as it might have been, the move towards open sourcing everything is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also nice to see C# evolving as well.

Over the past 10 years I’ve attempted to contribute towards the Microsoft development community in various ways – maintaining this blog for over 10 years now, creating over 20 open source projects, (with NAudio being my greatest hit!), 11 Pluralsight courses, a bunch of user group talks and a YouTube channel.

Sometimes people express surprise at where I find the time to do all this stuff. The answer is that I simply enjoy exploring new programming techniques and sharing what I’ve learned with others. In some ways, even the process of teaching is part of learning – it forces me to go deeper into a topic until I really understand it, and it also leaves behind a permanent record of what I learned so I can Google for it six months down the line when I’ve forgotten it again!

Looking back at the tools and technologies I’ve written about in the past, several have sadly faded away – Silverlight, CodePlex, Mercurial, and IronPython come to mind. But their place has been taken by the likes of Azure, F# and Docker, and of course I’ll continue to write about audio even though its not such a big part of my day to day programming any more.

Anyway, a big thanks to Microsoft for including me in their MVP program, as well to everyone who has read and commented on my blog here. And my challenge to you is, how are you going to share what you’ve learned with the community? Whether it’s starting a blog, or just emailing some tips and tricks to the other developers where you work, don’t keep all your knowledge to yourself.