Last year was rather busy. I pushed out 78 blog posts. I had lots of millions of page views with over half a million on the Shellshock bug post alone (and mostly just in September). There were a bunch of conferences both down here in Australia and overseas, a few national TV spots and another 5 Pluralsight courses. And the ultimate endorsement of online success, abusive trolls. It was a very good year :)
So per the title of the post, I was honoured to receive my fifth Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award today. The award recognises the things that people like myself have gotten up to over the previous year as it relates to community contributions and of course, doing really useful stuff with Microsoft things. My award continues to be in the Developer Security space and inevitably that’s where the majority of my focus goes, but I’ve also enjoyed spending a whole heap of time in Azure this last year as well. In fact there were 15 blog posts bearing the Azure tag in 2015, mostly due to writing on Have I been pwned? There’s also a Pluralsight course on how to modernise your web things with Azure that’ll hit the air any day now.
I have nothing but positive things to say about the MVP program. The four years since I was first awarded have gone by very quickly and being an MVP has brought some absolutely wonderful opportunities. As a professional endorsement it has been invaluable and the renewal comes at a particularly poignant time for me. I’ll write more about that in the next couple of weeks, but for now I will say that the MVP program has been a very important part of establishing credibility, independence and opportunities I could only dream of when I started being “public” five and a half years ago. I sincerely hope the opportunities the award has given me have benefited those of your reading this and that it continues to do so for many years to come.