Looking Back on 2023
This year went in quickly.
It’s always good to look back on what you’ve done and feed this into plans for the coming year and/or what you might change or try to do better. Here goes.
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Contracting and Consulting
I continued to operate independently. Offering software development, technical content creation, consulting, and contracting services.
My main areas of expertise involve building solutions using Microsoft technologies.
These include, but are not limited to:
- Artificial intelligence
- APIs
- C#
- Cloud Migration
- Microsoft Azure
- .NET
- SaaS
- Software architecture
- Web applications
Schedule a free 15-minute call with me if you’d like to learn more using this Calendly link.
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Microsoft MVP in Artificial Intelligence for 5th Consecutive Year
Microsoft awarded me the Most Valuable Professional Award (MVP) for the 5th year in a row. This meant receiving the “blue disk”.
Very happy to be recognised by the global community in this way. Thankyou!
Learn more about the Microsoft MVP Award here.
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Blogging
I published 35 blogs in 2023.
Each month I averaged between 7,500 – 10,000 page views and were read from people all around the world. This always blows my mind.
I migrated to Google Analytics 4 halfway through the year so tricky to see what the most popular topics readers enjoyed.
Some of these included:
- How To: Remote Debug a Deployed Azure Function using Visual Studio 2022
- First Look: Azure Open AI Studio, Prompt Engineering. What You Can Do and How.
- How To: Implementing Alt Text in SaaS Using Azure Computer Vision and Azure Functions
- 24 Lessons I Learned Bootstrapping SaaS with Twitter, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram for Business API Integrations
I was surprised at how popular some specific content was, such as How to Create a Power BI Custom Connector.
Many years later, the Meta / Instagram Graph API mini-series still proves to be popular! Evergreen content you might say.
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Technical Courses
I didn’t release any technical courses on Pluralsight, LinkedIn, or Cloud Academy this year as had plans to take more time off during the summer months.
My existing courses will help you get up to speed with many artificial intelligence topics and the X Developer Platform.
You can find them all here.
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YouTube
That said, sometimes I’ll record a short demo to accompany a blog post. In 2023, I recorded 6 demos and uploaded these to YouTube.
Most cover various ways you can leverage artificial intelligence. Some contain full blown applications or tools.
You can watch them here:
- How To: Blending Azure AI Speech and Azure Language to Create the Micro SaaS ‘Audio Notes’
- Using Azure AI Language to Perform Document Summarization
- Using Azure AI Speech to Perform Speech-to-Text Conversion
- Azure Open AI Studio, Prompt Engineering. What You Can Do and How.
- How To Build an AI Bot using Azure Functions, Chat GPT and the Twitter API v2 with C#
- How To Perform SQL Server Database Updates using Fluent Migrator
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SaaS, Social Opinion, and Platform Risk
I expanded on a post I shared on Twitter/X and published the blog 24 Lessons I Learned Bootstrapping SaaS with Twitter, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram for Business API Integrations.
To cut a long story short, I had to reduce functionality in a SaaS I built and run.
Rich analytics are now gone and only follower insights, content scheduling and automation remain.
Many others were experiencing the same thing after Twitter was bought by Elon Musk.
Shortly after the buyout, rate limits were reduced and the volume of available data you could pull from the developer APIs were restricted.
Fortunately, I’ve never bet the house on this SaaS. It’s always risky when you build in a walled garden. It’s the same issue for example, when publishing your content on a platform like Medium.
Get your own domain name and own your words. Own your digital real-estate on the web.
Diversify.
At some point whilst all this was going on, the Stripe integration started to fail due to 3DS security mechanisms not being fully implemented.
This meant payments stopped working. A double whammy. Now fixed.
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Launched Mood Tracking and Mental Health Tool Micro-SaaS
In between this I started to hack around with an idea I had.
Initially this ran on JSON files on my local machine and then morphed into a micro-SaaS that runs in Azure. It was released during men’s mental health week.
I built this in public and documented the entire process. You can read about this in the following blog posts:
- How To: Creating a Private Journal and Mood Tracking App Using .NET 6, Chat GPT, C# and Visual Studio 2022
- Announcement: Journal and Mood Tracking Micro-SaaS Released
- From Prototype to Production: Turning the Daily Tracker Journal and Mood Tracker App into a Micro SaaS
- Update: New Reporting and Artificial Intelligence Insights Added To SaaS Daily Tracker
- Introducing ‘Mood Insights’. New AI Features Added To SaaS Daily Tracker.
It didn’t take long to build this and was hacked together. One of the main outputs was a boilerplate solution that could be used in other SaaS experiments.
20 people signed up in the first week.
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Building Another Micro-SaaS, Audio Notes
I’ve worked on several projects that use speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and text analytics when creating conversational AI solutions.
It can be helpful to verbalise thoughts and ideas and get them automatically transcribed using speech-to-text for reference later. The problem is though you can end up with many notes to go through.
What if there was a way to summarize this content and create concise notes from the spoken word?
I created a mechanism to do this using Azure AI Language and Azure AI Speech services.
I built an end-to-end process that lets you record notes that automatically get transcribed then summarize with the main points in your transcription.
I called this Audio Notes.
The majority of the work is done with only some UI work outstanding. This will ship next year.
You can learn more about this in the following blog posts and see it in action:
- Introducing Audio Notes – Jamie Maguire
- Audio Notes: Using Azure AI Speech to Perform Speech-to-Text Conversion
- Audio Notes: Using Azure AI Language to Perform Document Summarization
- Audio Notes: Blending Azure AI Speech and Azure Language to Create a Micro SaaS
- Audio Notes: Creating an Interface to Browse Content
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Exited Microsoft for Startups Programme After Three Years
I had been part of the Microsoft for Startups Programme for 3 years, but my time came to an end after 3 years and failing to graduate onto the final tier.
This saved me substantial amounts of cloud compute costs and made it possible for me to get started and iterate on feature development.
There are many benefits to the programme beyond the technical. I wrote a short blog about this a while ago.
You can apply for the programme here.
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Joined Microsoft for Startups Programme as Mentor in Founders Hub
I exited the Microsoft for Startups Programme as a founder and a few months later was invited by Microsoft to become a mentor on the Founders Hub as part of the Expert Network.
I wrote a blog post about this and detail how I used to start-ups programme, benefits of joining and how you can do the same. You can read this here:
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Open-Source SDK for .NET Developers
I didn’t do much open-source development but did resolve some issues in my open-source developer SDK.
This SDK makes it easy for you to interact with the Twitter / X Developer Platform.
At the time of writing, it’s been downloaded almost 12,000 times.
Shout out to the community for their engagement with this. Especially Gary Ewan Park (@gep13) and Andrew Gubskiy (@andrew_gubskiy).
You can find the NuGet package here.
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Downtime
Downtime and exercise are important. I regularly took time off to travel in the UK and Europe and live the vanlife.
I maintained my 5×5 training programme.
Some new things included Spanish lessons using Duolingo and developing bit of a reading habit.
I got through 15 books reading just 10-20 pages very early in the morning. Walter Isaacsons books on Steven Jobs and Elon Musk were good reads. Check them out.
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That’s a Wrap!
The theme will be more of the same for 2024, but I have a few surprises up my sleeve.
More on that later though.
Thank you to everyone for their support in 2023! I look forward to seeing what 2024 brings.
