Well, I missed my usual January post, and given that I hardly wrote anything in 2025 anyway, I don’t think it was much of a surprise. I mean, I wrote a grand total of two blog posts in 2025 (excluding my “in review” posts), and that is the first time in the nearly 20 years of blogging that I’ve done only a single digit number of posts in a year.
The fact is, blogging, or at least the idea of blogging, just hasn’t been something that has been giving me much joy in the past year. My goal on blogging has always been to use it as a bit of a journal to document things I’m learning, and to share that with others in the hopes that it can help them out, and the reality is that 2025 just seemed to go by so fast and there’s been so much “new stuff” that by the time I found time to sit down and write, the thing I was going to write about felt obsolete.
Work
It’d probably come as no surprise that AI has been dominating what I’ve done for the past year. In the middle of the year I launches Awesome Copilot, a curated list of resources to help people learn about GitHub Copilot and how to use it, and it has been amazing to see the community around it grow. We started out with just a few resources in there, hoping to grow by a handful each month, but at the time of writing we have over 20k stars and around 500 resources in there - which honestly blows my mind. This is pretty much my full time job now, managing the OSS project and working with product teams to make it even better.
While I joke with my boss that I am now a markdown developer, I do still do a bit of “real” development work as the maintainer of the Aspire Community Toolkit, which was something we launched late in 2024. Again, this was something that I hoped would grow a small community, but again have been blown away by the response, I think we’re close to 40 integrations now, and we even had some of the work that started in the Community Toolkit migrate into Aspire itself, which is pretty cool.
Speaking
I gave what was probably my most favourite talk at DDD Melbourne last year for their locknote, a session called “Coding like it’s 2005”. This was me celebrating that I’m old how far we’ve come in the last 20 years of software development, and it was a lot of fun to put together - I ran an XP VM, hosted a SVN server, and wrote a .NET Framework 1.1 app live on stage (ok, some of it was pre-coded), showing what it was like to code back then, and how far we’ve come since, because as we have AI tools becoming more common in development, I want people to realise that this is just another evolution in the tools we use to write software, and that we should embrace it and use it to be more productive, just like we did with all the other tools we’ve had over the years.
You can check out the recording of the session on YouTube:
I also had the fortune to go to Microsoft Build in Seattle for the first time, and while there I presented a lightning talk, delivered two workshops on .NET + AI, proctored three other workshops, and spent the rest of my time at the experts area meeting with the community and learning about what they are building (oh, and I met my boss in person for the first time, turns out they are more than just a torso on a video call 😜).
You can see the session I did on YouTube as well:
And yes - I did juggle during that session, it was a dare from the production team, as they wanted to have a picture of me juggling for the session thumbnail 😅 (juggling is something I decided to teach myself at the start of 2025). Also, pro-tip, don’t try to download an AI model on conference wifi (or listen to the audience when they suggest that you do that).
And with that, let’s bring on 2026.