A Decade of Change

Ten

This is my tenth Microsoft MVP award.

I still do not really believe it. Being counted in this group is humbling in a way I have never gotten used to, and I hope I never do.

It Started in a Computer Lab

I started writing .NET in 2003, while I was still a university student. Around 2005 I found Mono and started writing extensions for the Banshee Music Player, mostly because the idea that C# could run somewhere that was not Windows felt like something nobody was supposed to be allowed to do. After that came years of ASP.NET and WinForms work for clients.

Then I started a consulting company built on BizTalk.

BizTalk was complicated. It was clunky. It was difficult in ways that were frequently its own fault. I had a great time with it. I wrote training programs for it and built libraries to sand down the worst edges, and I did that because there was something genuinely good buried in there, and I wanted other people to be able to find it without the bruises.

2011 Changed Everything

In 2011 I picked up Mono for Android, and MonoTouch after it. They were not called Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS yet. It was the same Mono I had been poking at six years earlier, grown up and pointed at a phone.

That is when everything changed for me, and it had nothing to do with the technology.

It was the first time in my career that I felt like I was building software inside a community instead of off in some corporate silo. So I started writing open source libraries. I started a mobile meetup group. I started a new consulting company aimed at helping businesses actually adopt this stuff. I worked with the Xamarin team to build and deliver content for Xamarin University. Eventually I was getting invited to speak at conferences all over the world, which I still do not have a graceful way to talk about. I was not trying to build a career out of it. I just wanted to hand my enthusiasm to as many people as I could.

The sense of community in those years was insane. Everyone was inviting. Everything moved so fast you could feel it. And you could sense Microsoft itself shifting underneath it, from a company that bought Xamarin into a company that behaved like one of us.

The Room Emptied

Then the pandemic hit and the room emptied out.

The conferences stopped. The meetups stopped. Xamarin University wound down and its work moved into Microsoft Learn. People tried to rebuild it online, and Reddit and Discord became the new water cooler, and it worked, sort of. It was not the same. Something about standing in a hallway with people who care about the same weird thing you do does not survive being turned into a channel.

So I went where I could still be useful and put my energy into libraries. If I could not hand somebody my enthusiasm in a hallway, I could at least hand them some working code.

Everything Flipped Again

And now here we are.

In the last six months, the way I work, the way I produce code, and the way I do my job have been turned completely around. Not adjusted. Turned around. I am still recalibrating, and I suspect anyone who says they are not is not paying attention.

Here is what bothers me about this moment, though. It is not the technology. It is that we have gotten derisive with each other. One camp treats anyone still typing their own code as a fossil. The other treats anyone using these tools as a fraud. Both sides are so loud about it that nobody is talking about the thing that actually matters, which is that a real gap is opening up between the people who have access to all of this and the people who do not. That gap is a genuine problem, and we are too busy dunking on each other to look at it.

I am not interested in that fight. I never have been. I am the guy who found something good in BizTalk. That is not an AI opinion I picked up last year, it is the oldest thing about me. Show me a difficult, ugly, badly explained piece of technology and my instinct is to go find whatever is good in there and drag it into the light so somebody else does not have to.

I have no idea where 2026 and 2027 go. I am excited anyway.

Thank You

Every good thing in the last twenty years came from this community. The people who answered my questions when I had no business asking them, the ones who let me talk at their meetup, the ones who filed issues on libraries I wrote at midnight, the ones who found something good in what I built and passed it along.

Ten of these now. Thank you. Genuinely.