2025 - Year in Review

What a year. If you’d told me at the start of 2025 what was coming, the response would have probably been a polite “yeah, sure.”

This post is a look back at what happened — not just the highlights, but the journey. Because honestly, a lot of it came as a surprise.

The Blog

Let’s start with this thing right here. 2025 was the most productive year for the blog by far. And not just quick updates — there were deep dives on Azure Policy management with EPAC, getting started with Pester, Sampler for module development, customizing module templates, and an honest look at the struggles of module development.

On the Azure side, there were posts about Policy Based Alerting with AMBA, Azure Function Apps, and Logic Apps finally supporting PowerShell.

Writing consistently has always been a struggle (if you’ve read the Blogging - the Mental Game post from 2018, you know what that looked like). This year it finally clicked. Not because it got easier, but because the overthinking stopped and the writing started. The year even ended with a new series — The Curious Case of… — for those debugging rabbit holes worth sharing.

Teaching

Before getting to the conference circuit, there was something else that took up a significant chunk of the first half of 2025.

An Azure Engineer Bootcamp was created from scratch — 10 full days of training spread over 10 weeks, covering AZ-900, AZ-104, AZ-040, Bicep fundamentals, Azure DevOps fundamentals, and git training. Part of the content was based on existing exam courseware, the rest was written specifically for this training. The first pilot class was a group of colleagues looking to become Azure Engineers or level up their existing skills, and it wrapped up in mid-July, just before the summer holiday season.

Building a training program from scratch is a different kind of challenge than writing a blog post or giving a conference talk. There’s way more structure involved, and the content has to work for people at different experience levels. It was a lot of work, but seeing the group grow over those 10 weeks made it absolutely worth it.

Speaking

A big year for speaking too — three events, three countries, three very different experiences.

PSConfEU 2025

Two sessions got accepted at PSConfEU 2025 in Sweden, which was incredible. The first was a session on Logic Apps with PowerShell. The second was supposed to be a hands-on Pester workshop together with Jakub Jares — the creator of Pester himself. Unfortunately, Jakub fell ill and couldn’t make it. Enter Rob Sewell (aka Mr Beard), who stepped in and made sure the workshop was still a success. Massive thanks to Rob for that — true community spirit in action.

Both sessions were recorded and are available on YouTube.

PSConfEU remains one of the best community events out there. The energy is something else.

Experts Live NL

Getting accepted to present at Experts Live Netherlands on Azure Monitor Baseline Alerts was… unexpected. Experts Live was always one of those events attended as a visitor, not a speaker. Stepping on that stage felt like a milestone.

MC2MC Live

November brought a trip to Kontich, Belgium for MC2MC Live: Transformers of the Digital Age. A first MC2MC event, and it won’t be the last. The Rocket Talk on AMBA went well, but what stood out most were the people. Shout-out again to the organizers and to Wim Matthyssen for being the best personal guide on a first visit.

PowerShell MVP

And then there was this. 🎉

The Microsoft MVP award for PowerShell was… honestly, surreal. Something that had been chased for years, and ironically it happened after the chasing stopped and the focus shifted to just doing what felt right — sharing knowledge, building tools, and being part of the community.

The me from 2018 — the one writing about impostor syndrome and struggling to put out a blog post — would not have believed this was coming.

Module Development

A big theme this year was PowerShell module development. Sampler became the go-to framework for building modules properly, PSModuleDevelopment opened the door to customizing templates beyond the defaults, and the struggles post tackled the less glamorous side — naming conventions, versioning, build scripts, all of it.

This is an area worth keeping investment in. Building modules the right way takes effort, but the payoff is worth it.

What’s Next — 2026

No big list of resolutions. But there’s one thing worth sharing:

The MVP Summit — for the first time. 🎉

As a freshly minted MVP, getting registered for the 2026 MVP Summit feels like the perfect way to kick off the new year. No idea what to expect — and if MC2MC taught anything, that’s usually when the best things happen.

Beyond that, the plan is simple: keep writing honestly, keep sharing what comes up, speak when the opportunity is there, and stay part of the community that’s given so much.

Here’s to 2026. Thank you to everyone who read a post, attended a session, or just reached out to say hi. It means more than you know.

Happy scripting 😊