Software Architect / Microsoft MVP (AI) and Technical Author

General Development

2021 – A Year In Review

It’s that time of year where we look back on the last 12 months.  It’s generally been a good year for me except for not being able to travel much.

Writing these annual blog posts helps me remember what I’ve done and if I’ve hit personal goals I’ve set.

I’ve tried to annotate certain parts with some tips that might help you. I hope you find them useful.

Headlines

Over the last 12 months, these are some of the main things that were going on:

  • Published 42 Blogs
  • Created 2 courses on Pluralsight
  • Became an author on Cloud Academy and created 1 course
  • Gained the Azure AI Engineer Associate accreditation
  • Maintained my Microsoft MVP in Artificial Intelligence status
  • Created the Tech Twitter Mega Directory to amplify community
  • Scheduled and sent 1,876 Tweets :-O
  • Launched new features in my Marketing SaaS (Social Opinion)
  • Secured partnerships for Social Opinion
  • Started getting the basics of a home gym
  • Participating in Twitter Spaces

 

The above kept me busy and by the time I got to the summer I took a month off from the extra community type activities. I was simply fried and wanted to enjoy more time with the kids outdoors.

 

Most Read Blogs

I wrote and published 42 blog posts over the last 12 months. The main topics were focused on:

  • Azure
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Cognitive Services
  • Chatbots
  • Microsoft Bot Framework
  • My marketing SaaS (Social Opinion)
  • My open-source SDK

 

Interestingly, the most read blog posts were a combination of content from the 2020 with the remainder being related to architecture and building chatbots using the Bot Framework SDK and Bot Framework Composer.

  1. Instagram Graph API – Part 2: Fetching data with the Insights API
  2. Instagram Graph API – Part 1: Introducing the Instagram Graph API and how do you connect to it?
  3. Simplify your architecture using the Orchestrator Pattern
  4. Software Architect / Microsoft MVP (AI) and Pluralsight Author
  5. Instagram Graph API – Part 3: How to write a C# API that extracts data using the Insights API
  6. Adding speech capability to your chatbot using Bot Framework and Azure Speech Services
  7. Integrating Bot Framework Composer and Adaptive Dialog to create dynamic, user-configurable chatbots
  8. Implementing Long running Tasks in Azure
  9. Using the Direct Line API to communicate with your Bot Framework Chatbot
  10. Exploring the LinkedIn Marketing Developer Platform

 

Some of the most read and engaged with content was my Instagram Graph API series. People seemed to really enjoy that, and it solved a lot of problems. I decided to package those up into a single resource and self-published it on Gumroad for sale.

I rarely check Google Analytics but logged in and seen there were 196k page views of the content in the blog over the last 12 months:

 

 

Most people arrived at my blog via organic channels:

 

 

My blogs were read all over the world:

Deeper dive into the top 10 visiting countries over the last 12 months: