I got the email a short while back and I still get a little buzz reading it every single time - I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for Azure, for the 2026-2027 award period. This makes eight years running now since that first award back in August 2019, and I don’t take a single one of them for granted.
Every year I say the same thing to anyone who’ll listen: the MVP award isn’t given for what you know, it’s given for what you share. So before anything else - thank you to the community. The people who show up to the Glasgow Azure User Group on a weeknight, the folks who come through the doors at DDD Scotland and Scottish Summit, everyone who comments on a blog post, corrects me when I’ve got something wrong, or drops a message on YouTube saying a video helped them get unstuck. None of this happens without you.
What the last year looked like#
This MVP year has probably been the most different one yet, because so much of it wasn’t really about Azure in isolation anymore - it was about Azure and AI colliding, and how quickly that’s changing the way we build things.
A few things stand out when I look back:
- Building with AI, properly. I spent a lot of this year pairing with GitHub Copilot and Copilot CLI to build real things end to end rather than just autocompleting a function here and there - an Azure governance web app that scores maturity, an AppInsights analyser Blazor dashboard, even a golf scoring app just for fun. Writing those posts up taught me as much as building them did.
- Conference season. Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite both gave me plenty to write about this year, and getting to attend, absorb it all, and translate it into something practical for the community is one of my favourite parts of being an MVP.
- Keeping the user group going. Glasgow Azure User Group kept running every couple of months. Small, consistent, in-person meetups still matter, even in a world of infinite online content.
- Writing through the platform shift. I wrote a fair bit this year about the move from Azure DevOps to GitHub Enterprise, which felt like the right moment to have that conversation properly rather than just watching it happen from the sidelines.
- Still learning. Still sitting exams, still going through Microsoft Learn modules, still trying to stay a couple of steps ahead so I’ve got something useful to pass on.
None of that is a huge, flashy list. It’s mostly just showing up, consistently, and writing down what I learn along the way so someone else doesn’t have to figure it out from scratch.
Why I still do this#
I get asked fairly often why I keep blogging, keep running the user group, keep putting talks together, especially now there’s a day job, a family, and about a hundred other things competing for the same hours. The honest answer is that I remember exactly what it was like starting out with zero Azure knowledge, and how much difference it made having other people share what they knew for free. Paying that forward is the whole point for me. The MVP award is a nice recognition of it, but it was never really the goal - it’s a by-product of just trying to be useful to people.
If you’re on that same path right now - learning Azure, wondering whether your blog posts or talks or GitHub repos matter to anyone - they do. Keep going. I wrote a post a few years back on how the MVP nomination process actually works if you want the mechanics of it, but the short version hasn’t changed: help people first, and the recognition tends to follow.
What’s next#
More of the same, really, just aimed at wherever the platform goes next. I expect this coming year leans even further into AI-assisted development on Azure - agents, Copilot, and the tooling around them are moving fast enough that keeping up is a full-time hobby on its own. I’ll keep writing it up here as I go and hopefully bump into you in the coming 12 months.
Here’s to year eight.
