Back in 2011, Microsoft gave me the rather awesome (IMHO) Most Valuable Professional Award for the first time. This is Microsoft's award for community leadership within a technology discipline which for me at the time, was developer security. I'm confident that award came largely due to the work I did on the OWASP Top 10 for .NET Developers series, a 10-part epic blog series that set me on the path to where I am today.
Speaking of today, I awoke (exceptionally early!) to another very welcome email from Microsoft:
I woke up at 1am unable to sleep with all these coding ideas for @haveibeenpwned in my head. Eventually just decided to get up at 3:30 and start work on it, only to find this email. This is nice ? pic.twitter.com/itsGfUCZcj
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) July 1, 2018
I couldn't help but think back to that original OWASP series with so many late nights and early mornings and weekends and holidays invested in getting it completed to the standard I wanted. More than 7 years on and nothing has changed with that underlying desire to create things for the web and share the experiences along the way. I never foresaw the nature of what it was I'd subsequently build and share with the world, but Have I Been Pwned was born of the same motivation as those early blog posts and the same yearning to create and share that had my mind racing at ridiculous-o-clock this morning.
Thank you everyone that continues to support what I do and gives me the opportunity to be a part of this community ?