A few of my friends were already worried since I didn’t publish the now-classic “Humbled & Honored” post on LinkedIn – perhaps I had not been renewed this year, dropped out of the program or even been kicked out? But no, reality is much more boring: I’ve just been on vacation and haven’t spent much time near my keyboard 😅
So long story short, I was indeed renewed as Microsoft MVP for the 2024-2025 season. 🥳
This year, I’ve been able to disconnect quite thoroughly. Maybe you’ve noticed the missing blog posts over the past few weeks. I’ve been taking some time off with my kids, traveling with my family, finishing the renovation (well… finishing SOME of it, anyway), tending to my garden, spending time with friends and… simply unwinding.
And this year, it was sorely needed.
Background
Every year around the beginning of July LinkedIn and Twitter are filled with posts stating how “Humbled & Honored” their authors are to be recognized by Microsoft in such a way.
I’m sure reading that becomes a bit tiring for everyone (yours truly included). But as worn out the phrase might be, it feels to me like a good way to describe how most of us in the program really feel about the recognition.
Maybe this year more than in a couple of years. See, it’s my fifth year in the program, and for the first time, I was included in the MVP program in 2 different categories:
- Microsoft Azure (in the “Cloud Native” technical area – essentially AKS) and
- Microsoft 365 (largely SharePoint if you ask me).
Looks like a bit of a trend: I feel like Microsoft has awarded many more double-MVPs this year than before.
And it’s good to see Redmond acknowledging the new world order. Many of us work in the intersection between 2 or more technologies. For me, it’s (broadly speaking) been between Azure and Microsoft 365 for a long time. Often with a dash of delightful “general” application development… And a highly unfortunate and undesired sprinkle of Windows stuff added on top.
Cloudy skies ahead?
While I’ve always been blogging for the explicit purpose of documenting these hacks and workarounds for myself, looking at the developments around different AI tools and Copilots for coding and the visitor numbers trending down for koskila.net, I can’t help but wonder how valuable will blogging be for the community in the future? I wish not to be relegated to simply feeding the AIs and Copilots of the World with my content, only to have it uncredited, repurposed and often misunderstood when spat out by a large language model in a browser, phone or IDE somewhere.
Then again, I find myself wondering how different that actually is compared to feeding the algorithms of Bing and Google over the years. It’s not like adhering to the whims of our algorithmic overlords has been that fun either – often I would much rather just dump my code samples and links to solutions on a page, but I’ve instead ended up spending a lot of time on different SEO improvements, WordPress tweaks, weekly plugin updates, structured data snippets (different markup for Google and Bing, by the way) and so making sure Google likes not only my sitemaps, my information architecture but also my site’s FCP, LCP and CLS, in addition to keeping WordPress and all its plug-ins up-to-date is not something I greatly enjoy.
Solutions are worthless unless shared!
Documenting the weird workarounds for my own future use has been the point of this blog from the get-go. The site started as my personal (but public) stash of notes, and slowly over the years developed an audience reaching almost a million unique visitors in a year.
But to go through the effort of making the content also easily ingestible for readers other than myself is something I’ve found worth doing, even if it has taken some time. It’s all of the other stuff that gets quite tiresome.
I’m not saying I’ll quit blogging, but of course taking a break over the summer has revealed how much work maintaining the site actually is. And how much WordPress ends up just getting in the way instead of providing value.
And in a very timely manner, the company hosting koskila.net let me know a few days ago that they’ll discontinue their service at the end of August. So I’m left with about a month to either move the site elsewhere, or finally take the step to abandon WordPress and use “something else”.
The good news is that the world is full of exciting static site generators. The breadth of the content and different WordPress features I’ve used made the migration incredibly cumbersome the last time I’ve taken a look at the possibility. But the site generators have evolved and WordPress has arguably devolved – so perhaps now is a good time to take the leap!
Alas, WordPress is not the only technology starting with a ‘W’ that’s giving me trouble. If I didn’t bitch about Windows so much, I would’ve probably been at a real risk of becoming a Windows MVP eventually due to spending so much time trying to keep this patchwork of poorly QA’d hacks together.
Windows – more Facebookized (or enshittified) than ever?
It doesn’t really help.
It’s feels great to be the unpaid tester of a product you paid thousands of dollars for, right? Seeing how Windows is now an incredible mess of new features being A-B tested on paying customers, old features being in various states of disrepair or mismanagement and a clusterfuck after a clusterfuck just waiting to happen, it feels like a poorly executed version of Facebook’s update rollout model. The difference is that when Microsoft (or any of the hardware vendors) mess up, I lose a few days worth of time I could spend on invoiceable work, and when Facebook messes up, I don’t see what that one racist old relative that still uses Facebook has to say about immigrants now.
These 2 are not the same.
Particularly, in less than 6 months, I’ve had to completely reinstall 2 different premium laptops (priced some 2000 USD and 4000 USD, respectively) from scratch multiple times, due to different unforeseen issues with Windows. And I don’t even have Crowdstrike installed on my machine! 🙄
I’ve spent (without exaggeration) weeks suffering from both Dell and Microsoft “shifting right”. Moving the responsibility of testing to paying end users, that is. And while I’m sure I belong to a tiny minority with all the issues I’ve faced, that doesn’t make me any happier to be looking at a Blue Screen, trying to kick my machine out of an endless boot loop, having Start Menu permanently broken or just spending some time trying to figure out where every single Windows App has disappeared from my machine. All of these things happened in the last few months.
And since OneDrive is what it is… I’ve lost files in this process too. Real-time synchronization isn’t a feature yet, apparently.
Is there still a future for Windows?
My recent experiences have made me seriously question, what’s the future of Windows. The new Copilot+PCs (or are they called “Copilot+PC PCs”?) look promising. One just has to wonder whether they’ll be any more stable than what I currently have… Or whether my next PC will finally be a Mac 🤷♂️
Hell, my new machine has a Copilot -key but pressing it only brings up a different Start menu. That’s… helpful. Making it open Copilot would require using Autohotkey or something, and I just can’t be bothered. Especially since it feels like “Bing Copilot” (the consumer application / website) now has a quota of something like 10 queries per machine per day, so you can’t really do much with it anyway.
Only time will tell if Windows still has a future. Personally, I just wish I could have an Operating System that doesn’t get in my way as much. I do enough herding, maintaining and administering with kids and my “autonomous” lawn mowers. I don’t want a PC that requires my constant attention.
It’s lucky other stuff actually works
That all said, there’s plenty of things to still be excited about in the Microsoft space. The new renaissance of SharePoint (with Viva and M365 Copilot, obviously) makes me feel more invested in this platform than I’ve felt since.. Well, probably since when I first started working with SharePoint over 10 years ago!
The productivity improvements and maturity of AKS and Azure in general make it feel like the right stack choice for most workloads. And everything being hosted on Linux servers means it’s reasonably stable, too 😉
And while I don’t get to play with them much, the innovation and velocity of MAUI and Blazor keeps me getting back to my hobby projects time and time again (at work I build serverside, CLI tools or with Vue for the web).
Well, when I get around to actually build something, that is.
What the last 12 months has lacked in stability for my personal life (I tell you, it’s been a bit of an unwanted rollercoaster ride), it has more than provided in stability in my professional life. Perhaps even too much so – maybe some of the exhaustion I’ve been burning off during this summer leave has been due to the monotonous work profile someone in middle management apparently has to suffer through. Moving cards back and forth on a couple of boards to request and share status updates gets really boring, and I envy my team members who get to code all the things that to me are just cards on a board.
Don’t get me wrong; The World needs managers, team players and people who act as force multipliers for their peers or team members. I’m just not sure if I find that role very interesting after all 🤷♂️
What’s next?
After a month of disconnecting from everything, it’s nice to get back to work anyway. And with my hosting provider yanking my website in about 4 weeks, at least I know what I’ll be working on during the rare after-hours opportunity to work on some interesting tech…
And I do need to finish a few draft posts still on WordPress before this site will see any changes! Or perhaps to figure out how to migrate them all to a static site – standard WordPress export fails me) .
This became quite the rant. To loop back to the original topic, renewal in the Microsoft MVP program is not something one can take for granted, and this year some awesome community folks were not renewed. Seeing that always makes you wonder, what the actual criteria for being able to stay in the program are and how vocal one can be about the frustrations with some parts of the Microsoft ecosystem (while being quite hyped about some others) and not be penalized for it. But we’ll see.
Maybe the “Humble” (of “Humbled & Honored“) is as much about keeping Microsoft honest and real when they mess up, as it is about remembering to keep one’s pride in check, stay respectful and always learning.
With that, new (and old) adventures await!
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
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