Looking back on 2016

It’s that time of the year again: looking back on what you’ve accomplished last year and make promises that you’ll do better this year. As for many of us, this has been a year with ups and downs, luckily mainly ups.

The year kicked off with a bang when I got my MVP Award email on the very first day of the year, for which I am still very happy and honored. Congratulations everywhere and some people made the remark “Only now? I thought you were MVP for a few years already”. Which is of course nice to hear, but doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t because I was never nominated up until the cycle in which I got awarded. Conclusion: if you know someone who you think deserves to be an MVP, nominate them so the appropriate teams at Microsoft get to know this person and take him into consideration.

For me the award last year was a sign that I’m doing a good thing and it inspired me to keep putting that much of my spare time into the community (which I love, if you see it as work then you’re doing it wrong). Looks like I’m still doing a good thing, as I have been re-awarded for this year. I hope to get back to an UWP assignment at a client someday, because that would ease writing some interesting blog posts for you to read. Now my Windows 10 development is limited to my spare time, which I have to share with plenty of other things. But for now I’m quite happy with my current assignment which goes back to my roots: back-end .NET development, and where I can bring my skills and experience to the table while leading a small team (which needs to grow soon as we have so much work planned).

Even though I’m behind my pc A LOT, 2016 has been the year where I broke my elbow crashing with the bike (sport is healthy they say), which meant no coding for 3 weeks … and also the year in which I can now call myself a dad of a wonderful daughter. Being born a month early and going through a few rough first months, she’s now a 6 month old tiny wonder that makes me smile every day. I happily give up a few hours of coding for her!

What will we do in 2017? Certainly ramp up work at the current client, as we started the second of 4 business-critical applications and later this year we’ll most likely have development running on 3 or maybe even all 4 in parallel. In my spare time I’ll surely be a bit less behind my pc because of the daughter, but on the other hand we’re starting up a new open-source project and I still have a few ideas where I’d like to find some time for. You might have noticed that I’m less active on twitter lately and that will probably continue to be. One only has 24 hours a day and I’d rather give you great content (open-source code, blog posts, …) than small fragments of 140 characters which get easily lost in the huge swamp of twitterverse.

I wish you the best for this year and hope I inspired you to do great things.

Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; code samples licensed under MIT.
comments powered by Disqus
Built with Hugo - Based on Theme Stack designed by Jimmy