On the 1st September I was recognized as a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies because of my ongoing contributions to the developer community. This honour for me is a culmination of a lifelong career dedicated to technology, as well as a mindset dedicated to personal development, sharing knowledge and helping others.
In recent years I have found myself increasingly grateful for my career and have been giving back to the community in as many applicable ways that I can. Including.
Blog Posts
I tend to post on my personal blog www.ManchesterDeveloper.com. I know people like to post on any number of popular content sites but there is something to be said for rolling your own blog website, having full control of it and 'owning' that content.
You Tube Videos
I have created a number of videos which can be seen on my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/LeeEnglestone/
They range from technical tips to Augmented Reality experiments and are recorded using OBS.
Visual Studio Tips Website
To celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2019 I created a website showing a number of tips for Visual Studio that I have collated called www.VisualStudioTips.co.uk.
Last December I even created a Visual Studio Tips Advent Calendar, revealing a new tip video each day.
Augmented Reality with Xamarin Website & Talks
I am proud to be (seemingly) one of the few people that are promoting and sharing the little known fact that as a .NET developer you can create Augmented Reality experiences on your iOS device using Xamarin and ARKit using C# and .NET.
I've created a dedicated website to introduce .NET developers to this called www.XamarinArkit.com. Something I am very excited about sharing, especially with the rise in popularity and adoption of Augmented Reality.
Code Review Checklist
In an attempt to help improve code reviews for all developers (and being inspired by http://webdevchecklist.com/), I thought i'd create a website that shared some common things to look at during code reviews. So I created www.CodeReviewChecklist.com. It is still a work in progress, and having made it open source, I have been fortunate to have a couple of contributors continue to make it better.
Hackathon Tips
Being a big, big fan of Hackathons, having attended a lot over the years and huge advocate of them I wanted to create a website to help people get the most out of them, so I created www.HackathonTips.com. I do hope that after the pandemic, we can get back to having regular in-person hackathons.
A variety of talks to .NET User Groups
Being fairly new to public speaking, I am enjoying giving talks to .NET user groups and have even submitted some talks to 'larger' conferences. It has taken some time to get comfortable.
Mentoring at Coding groups
I have been regularly mentoring at CodeUp Stockport meetups. Though these days, I seem to be giving more career advice to would-be and new developers rather than technical mentoring.
Augmented Reality for .NET Developers book
Some months ago, I approached APress about writing a book Augmented Reality for .NET Developers using Xamarin. To my surprise they accepted the proposal. I am still writing the book, having submitted several chapters and hope to have it complete by November with publishing some time after that.
It is a very rewarding but also time consuming pastime.
Open Source Contributions
I regularly shared code via open source on GitHub and have contributed to a few open source projects. Something I wish to do more. Come on Hacktoberfest!
Twitch
Being quite late to the live streaming craze, I have done a few live streams on Twitch with mixed results. Ultimately I find myself enjoying creating things live while spewing a live stream of not so inner dialogue. I just can't find the time to dedicate to regularly live streaming at the moment. Not until I've completed my book anyway.
You can follow me on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/leeenglestone
I'm pretty active on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LeeEnglestone and agree with someones recent sentiment that you follow the 'person'. So I don't shy away from tweeting about random things as well as technical things.
Acknowledgements
To say that I have achieved what I have without help would be the greatest of mis-justices. The only reason I can be a full time dev manager and then do the community contributions that I love in evenings (and write a book) is due to the understanding and patience of my family and friends. Coupled with the support and help from the dev community which I happily give back to, it's safe to say I wouldn't be an MVP without a number of peoples help. Including role models and those people that nominated me.
Summary
My contributions are a result of my mindset than anything else. Things that I enjoy, scratching of itches, sharing of knowledge. They tend to just happen naturally these days.
It helps that I believe the .NET stack is truly unique in its breadth and depth and is a blank canvas for your imagination and creativity. And one that helps me continually innovate on a number of platforms.
The .NET and developer community is one that has given me so much, I enjoy giving back when I can.
Watch this space. I am only just beginning.
-- Lee
