A little over a decade ago now, I awoke from a long haul flight to find an email I never expected to see: my first Microsoft MVP award. I earned the award by doing something many people couldn't understand, namely devoting a bunch of my time to creating things for the community. Not for money, not for glory, but for the love of technology and for the joy of seeing it make a difference to people. All this time later and in a fundamentally different world to one all of us were in back then, I still find people unable to grasp why I and so many of my friends and peers would want to do what we do: "You mean you don't get paid to write a blog post? Speak at a user group? Join a podcast? What madness is this?!" Frankly, if they have to ask the question then they probably won't understand the answer.
This week marks the beginning of my 11th year as an MVP with the warmly awaited notification hitting my inbox this weekend. Despite the fundamentally different travel landscape, it was still a very full preceding 12 months: weekly update vids and blog posts every week, loads of other blog posts, heaps of podcasts, I don't even know how many media interviews, I took over Coinhive, open sourced a big chunk of HIBP, did some cool stuff with the FBI and even went to a real live in-person conference! In fact, I just found the AMA I did at that event on YouTube so in the spirit of continuing to create and share stuff just because it's fun, I'll start rounding out this short post by embedding the video below:
Lastly, as with previous years, a big thanks to everyone for consuming the things I create and making them popular enough to allow me to continue doing more of it 😊