Despite the anniversary continually falling on that most foolish of days, it appears I have indeed been renewed and will now go into my third year of MVP’dom.
For those of you not familiar with the process, every year as an MVP’s renewal date approaches, the powers that be at Microsoft look at what you’ve done and work out if you’ve aligned closely enough with the MVP ethos to deserve a renewal. As part of the process, MVPs keep track of their highlights from the year which is actually a good opportunity to reflect on what we’ve been able to contribute to the technology community.
I churned out 59 blog posts with about 1.13 millions page views, had a truckload of comments via Disqus (is there an easy way to tell numbers on Disqus?), pushed half a dozen videos to YouTube with 364k views across 1.76 million minutes of viewing time (yeah, surprised me too!), hit the media dozens of times (tech and mainstream), spoke on half a dozen podcasts, presented at DDD Sydney and Web Directions, appeared on national TV twice (once on cold call scams and again on internet banking) and presented at three user groups.
The highlights (at least in terms of blog post page views were):
- Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco (no surprises there!)
- 10 lessons for uncultured web developers (some great discussions on this in the comments)
- Scamming the scammers – catching the virus call centre scammers red-handed (and yes, the bastards are still at it)
In amongst all that, I also totally redesigned troyhunt.com (welcome mobile users!), added some ads (unfortunately hasn’t bought me a Ferrari yet, but the fuel bill is covered), wrote a complete classroom training course on the OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers, built out ASafaWeb further including the ability to schedule scans and of course got myself along to the MVP summit in Seattle.
Thanks again to the folks who have contributed great ideas, actively and robustly discussed my content online and in person and generally just engaged in making the web a more enjoyable and more secure place to be.