Year 2024 has come to an end. In general 2024 was a hard year for lots of people. Macro economy wasn’t that good here in Finland, lots of my friends were having troubles or disturbs in their personal life and in general the mood wasn’t that good. The on-going war in Ukraine and uncertainty in the geopolitical atmosphere is taking the toll on many of us. It is just one thing, but combined with other small things it is piling up this year. Despite all of this we had also lots of great stuff in 2024 and we should also remember celebrate what was good in this year.
Now let’s not go too deep into worlds political marionette performances. In this post I want to focus on what was great for me in 2024 and I hope that year 2025 is going to be better for all of us.
This Blog
Let’s start by summarizing how this blog is doing. In 2024 I shifted my main focus away from Azure DevOps as I don’t work with that product so often anymore. Well I use it almost daily, but as my role changed from Architect/Consult to CTO I had to start widening my knowledge in other areas more. This means that I cannot be super deep in one technology as I need to handle lots of new tech (like AI) + existing tech that our company is still using.
In 2024 I had 13 892 visitors in my blog and approx. 50% them were from United States. Second biggest country was India, so shout out to all my readers from those countries. The total visitor number is bit less than what I had in 2023, but that is ok. I didn’t have many “huge hit” blog posts as I had in 2023. My number one post in 2024 was “How to Fix Crashing Snipping tool After Windows 11 Update“, which isn’t a big surprise. I usually blog about quite niche things like Semantic Kernel or new Microsoft Fabric features. These topics aren’t that popular compared to Windows 11 problems😀. That single top viewed post received 1200 views this year. During year 2024 I published 22 blog posts. That is in line what I had planned for this year (one every two week). I hope I can maintain this phase, but I have to say that it is not that easy.
Most of my traffic comes from search engines (over 90%), which is absolutely great. This means that I can reach people outside of my own “IT bubble”. There is nothing wrong in my IT bubble, but I still love the idea of “helping” as many people as possible with my blog. In my IT bubble I can help people also with other ways.
Career
As 2024 rolled forward I was offered position of CTO in our company Adafy. I have worked for ten years now in Adafy so the leap into CTO role was quite natural move. I already knew lot about the tech stuff happening in the company, was involved in employee education programs and was a member of the executive team. CTO has a lots of responsible in a company and I didn’t take this position lightly. I knew that I need to be responsible of lots of different tasks like organizing architect boards, give a tech presentations to customers, be part of selling team etc. All of this requires lots of time and preparations, which means that I don’t have so much time to code anymore. Actually it can take a whole week when I don’t event open Visual Studio anymore. I do work with Microsoft Fabric and Azure a lot, but I clearly have less time for hard-core C# coding, which is a bit sad.
CTO
My philosophy as CTO is to empower our personnel. I don’t have knowledge about everything in tech and as Adafy is Azure and .NET expert house our employees have lots of really good expertise in those areas. So my job is to crowd this knowledge. Get people involve in development of our company and ensure that they have all the tools to do a good job. I will support them with my knowledge and in the other hand I will learn a lot from them on a way.
Personal Life
In my personal life 2024 was a good year for me. I didn’t have any major health issues, I have a good job, lovely family and everything is rolling well. We bought our first RV this year and we made a six (or seven?) week long road trip in Europe. During our trip we visited Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland (shortly), Lichestein, Austria, Italy, San Marino, Czech, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia during our trip and it was absolutely fantastic. We drove approx. 7000km and slept in the RV for the whole time. When we drove back we did 2800km in six days and I have to say that was maybe bit too much. Still good but bit exhausting trip.
Pinball
As my friends know, I am also fanatic pinball player and love to play in local tournaments. My current IFPA country ranking in Finland is 22. and my world raking is 1262. My ranking is steadily raising so life is looking good in this area also. I managed to win my first bigger tournament this year as I finished first🥇 in REDI pinball tournament (out of 43 players). Before that second place was my best position.
MVP
In late August I received an email from Microsoft, that I was accepted to the Microsoft MVP program and I received award on the .NET category.
“A Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) is a recognition awarded by Microsoft to individuals who demonstrate outstanding expertise, leadership, and contributions to the community in Microsoft technologies. MVPs are typically passionate about technology, actively share their knowledge through blogs, forums, presentations, or other means, and help others use Microsoft tools effectively. It’s an acknowledgment of their efforts in building and supporting technical communities.”
I was nominated by Jussi Roine for the award and it is of course a huge complementary about your technical skills. You really need to know stuff to become Microsoft MVP. This award kind of underlines the fact that I actually might have some knowledge about Microsoft stuff which feels great. Thank you Jussi for the nomination I greatly appreciate it.
What Else?
JAUG
In the end of 2024 we organized first JAUG (Jyväskylä Azure User Group) meeting in Adafy’s office. JAUG is a new user group for all the Azure enthusiasts who are living in Jyväskylä region. Jyväskylä already had active AWS meetup group, we didn’t have any fore the Azure. In our first meetup Anssi Pannula gave talk about pull vs push container updates and I talked about “Whats new in Ignite 2024”.
AI Studies
During 2024 I also had some time to study and I completed the “Artificial intelligence and data analytics 1” study module (16 cr) at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences. The studies involved lot of basic data analysis like preparing the data and implementing visualization and basic machine learning with Python and Jupyter Notebooks. I really liked this study module as I was already interested from Data analysis and AI. I didn’t know how to write Python before these studies, but I have found out that it is not that hard language to learn. Copilot can help a lot and you basically just need to work mainly with Dataframes and Pandas, so you don’t have to know everything about the language.
2025
So what about 2025? Any plans? That is excellent question. So far I have three goals for 2025:
- Arrange big party for my 40th birthday
- Travel to Seattle for Microsoft MVP Summit
- Sluicing gold at Lapland during the summer
I think that is good start for 2025. All of those three things should happen before end of August, so I still have some room for other interesting stuff for rest of the year. Maybe time for more studies? Maybe I will complete few new MS certifications? Who knows.
For you dear reader, I hope all the best for 2025 and happy New Year🎇!
