Category: New Year

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Recap 2022 and boot into 2023

Wishing you a happy …

The first week of 2023 is behind us, my ‘holidays’ are over, and it is time to boot up 2023. Officially you are not allowed to wish anyone a “Happy New Year” anymore after January 7th.

In the Netherlands, the holidays are a bit different this year compared to other years. In general, we take the last two weeks of the year off but given how Christmas and New Year ended up on the calendar the two-week holiday disconnect was now set to the last week of 2022 and the first week of 2023 by our government.

2022 has been an ups and down year for me. The Up was definitely the Transatlantic Cruise to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary sailing from Dover to New York with stops in France, UK, Spain, and Bermuda. An experience I wouldn’t want to have missed for the world. The downside was that after staying away from it for over two years I finally got hit by COVID-19, most likely picked it up on our return trip flying back from New York to Berlin or on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam, where we ran into huge crowds all coughing and sneezing while travelling home using airplanes and trains.

Although COVID-19 did not hit me very hard, a mild flu without too much fever, the coughing didn’t go away and kept going on a low level. Just before X-mas, however, I adopted a heavy flu infection. I guess I was still somewhat vulnerable to not being completely recovered from COVID. This resulted in a Pneumonia and my body didn’t allow me to do anything beyond having a time-out. My ‘Body Battery’ didn’t even climb up on my Garmin and zero-ed out for a lengthy period.

Time to visit the doctor (last time was about 10 years ago, I am -knock on wood- not much of a doctor visitor). The examination by my doctor resulted in a huge pile of medication with powerful types that started to kick in the moment I took them in. It looks like things are changing for the better now, at least my ‘Body Battery’ is showing upward movements again.

From a Soft as in Software perspective 2022 was not bad, until my health went south that is. In 2022 I created Office Add-in Starter projects to have new fresh Office Developers to easily get started building their first Word, Excel or Outlook Add-ins using Office JavaScript APIs. Also, I was able to build Blazor based Office Add-ins allowing you to use more .NET based coding, still allowing you to interact with Office hosts such as Word, Excel, or Outlook.

I pushed all of my Office Add-in demo repos into the official Microsoft OfficeDev/Office-Add-in-samples repo by creating Pull Requests and even did some small presentations on the Microsoft Office Add-ins Community calls.

Here are the links to the Add-ins and presentations:

Look at the above links and try to build some of your own Office Add-ins and let me know what you like or don’t like about it. I think the option to use Blazor in your Office Add-ins can be a powerful help if you are a .NET developer from origin and should make it easier to hook into Office, maybe allowing you to move your VSTO Office Add-ins into Office JS Add-ins.

So, there is my New Year’s rant … let’s focus on the future and see where we are going. For one thing my body just warned and gave a clear message to put your health at number one.

I still have lots of plans though so keep an eye out and hope to see you on my YouTube Channel, Twitch Channel or on my Soft as in Software landing pages with this blog!

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Start With a Bang

Happy New Year!

We left behind 2021, our second year covered with Covid, and moved into 2022. Just when I was about to close the year, traditionally baking a huge batch of “Oliebollen”, “Appelflappen” and “Ananasflappen” (Google it if you don’t know what they are), I received an email from Twitch Corp telling me that I leveled up to Twitch Affiliate.

Twitch Affiliate

If you look at the specs it doesn’t feel like a massive thing:

– Reach fifty followers
– Stream for eight hours
– Stream on seven different days
– Average of three viewers

… but it is harder than you think.

The requirements span is within a 30-day timeframe. The “Stream for eight hours” and ” Stream on seven different days” are the easy ones although reserving seven days out of thirty to do live streaming is already hard to reach for most but it is something you simply can set your mind to and do it without the help of the community. It means streaming twice a week for over an hour to get the eight hours and seven instances in place.

With a niche subject (Live Coding is already a niche subject on its own on Twitch) such as Office Development, coding in general, it is extra hard to get someone’s attention on Twitch. Twitch is more focused on gaming where streamers are sharing their gameplay on stream.

Twitch is not actively pushing content under the noses of people, so you must build your own attention to your channel. Next step is to reach the fifty followers and average of three viewers. Especially the last part, getting an average of three viewers during the full eight hours is tough. People quickly visit and leave after watching for a while, and as it is a chicken-egg issue (more viewers give more interaction making it more interesting to join in and stick around) they usually zap over to other channels after watching a few minutes. If lucky you get them to follow you and show up again at a later session.

In the last week of the year, I was lucky another developer channel on Twitch, going by the name of “one1lion”, to raid my channel when he ended streaming for the day and that gave exposure to my channel from another direction. I really appreciate him doing that for me and make sure you visit his channel; you can learn a thing or two from that.

Anyway, 2022 started with a blast for me, let’s see where we go this year and check in at my now Twitch Affiliate channel and hit the follow button!

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Happy 2020

It’s been a while, almost year, here … and whenever there is a new year, we pick up our resolutions from last year and see what we can do that we missed progressing the past year. Blogging is one of these things … so let’s pick this up again for now and see where it ends.

In my professional work I’ve been limited in doing things programmer-wise, more a people manager than coding manager at this time. Trying to get our foreign team up and running and at sometimes actually deliver some products. Doing so means I have almost no time at all to do programming.

For this reason, I decided to go on and do the Live Coding thing. Forcing me to go live in front of a camera and coding live on screen is pushing me to keep my coding skills on par. Not easy as what you learn today is outdated tomorrow, but boy … the things you can do in code these days are absolutely amazing!

So join me in my Live Coding sessions on Twitch. You can find my channel here:

https://twitch.tv/MaartenVanStam

Hit the follow button if you are, like me, too lazy to look up the broadcast schedule so you get notified whenever I get online to do the Programming Thing.

At this time I’m working on two main topics:

· Office Development (Who would have guessed?) where I’m trying to do the same things that I was able to do using VSTO to build my Add-ins. Spoiler Alert: You can’t do everything you were able to do with VSTO, but you can do some cool shit anyway …

· Blazor Web Development, building web sites using C# and .NET Core … where Office moved away from .NET to Web Technologies .NET did exactly the other way around and is now focusing on Web Technologies!

Let me know what you think about all these new and not so recent technologies … will they save the world?

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