2019 Review – The roller coaster

By João Ferreira Dec 31, 2019 SharePoint 0 Comments

Another year is ending and for me it is time to sit down, look back to the last 365 days and write about everything I have produced and shared with the community.

2019 was a crazy year with a lot of ups and downs, turns and twists but in the end it was the best year of my professional career.

Without further ado, let’s go down memory lane and let me share everything that happened in the last year of the decade.

A new job

2019 was the year that I switch jobs for the first time. Last October I moved from BindTuning and joined Beezy to assume a Technical Lead role, which allows me to continue to work with the cutting edge Microsoft technologies creating and improving the experiences on SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

Awards and recognitions

Started 2019 receiving the Microsoft MVP award which gave me a lot of new opportunities and the possibility to visit Microsoft Campus for the first time.

Throughout the year I have received other recognitions:

• M365.Social – David Warner II has put together a list of contributors that are very active in the SharePoint community, (the most collaborative, passionate and sociable community in software development) and I am happy to be among so many great names. If you are looking for awesome content about SharePoint this is the place where you should start.
• Feedspot – Climbed 30 positions in the ranking of the top 75 SharePoint blogs to end the year in the 20th position.

And I have been nominated for two awards, and even thought I ended up not wining it was very rewarding to be in the final shortlists.

• Top 25 SharePoint Influencers – This award recognize the top 25 SharePoint influencers worldwide, the nominees are no longer available but final list with the winners is available here. If you work with SharePoint, make sure you follow each one of them.
• Top 25 Teams Influencers – This award was intended to recognize the top 25 Microsoft Teams influencers worldwide but sadly until today the list was not made public.

Blogs and numbers

The year has started with an extreme make over to my personal brand HANDS ON tek, the blog that I started 9 years ago was archived and the domain handsontek.net is my new personal home page.

HANDS ON SharePoint blog smashed all the previous records established last year, with a growth of 97% and 228,800 views.

I’ve wrote 33 blog posts the same exact number I did last year and the top 3 articles are all related with modern SharePoint.

1. Convert Classic root sites to Modern SharePoint
2. Create a modern breadcrumb navigation on SharePoint
3. Enable custom script on modern SharePoint sites to recover your favourite functionalities

HANDS ON Teams is a new blog that I started during 2019, as the name indicates here you can find everything related with Microsoft Teams.

This blog was created because during this year I have invested a lot of time learning and working on Microsoft Teams, which I believe, will be the most used collaboration tool in the next decade.

Even though HANDS ON Teams is less than one year old I have wrote 14 posts and it had 17,250 views, below you can check the top 3 articles.

1. Run Multiple Instances of Microsoft Teams
2. How to get Microsoft Teams tenant ID
3. Create Teams using PowerShell

Combined the two blogs got 246,050 views and I have published 47 posts which is not bad considering that I am only doing it on my spare time.

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Projects

While working to write articles I often end up creating solutions that once the post is published I also make available on GitHub. This year I have created 5 new repositories with solutions for SharePoint.

• Application Insights for Classic SharePoint – If you want to monitor your classic SharePoint site this solution will automatically send the data to Azure
• Application Insights for Modern SharePoint – If you want to monitor your modern SharePoint site this solution will automatically send the data to Azure
• Add Google Tag Manager to Modern SharePoint – This solution helps you to connect multiple services from Google to your Modern SharePoint sites from a central web console
• Share a list item to Microsoft Teams –This solution allows you to share any list item to Microsoft Teams with a click of a button
• Share a SharePoint page to Microsoft Teams – This solution allows you to share any SharePoint page to Microsoft Teams using a floating button
• View formatting template – a site collection template with all the list formatting examples available on the PnP GitHub repository if you want to try them this template will help you to get started

I have also published other projects that even though related with the Microsoft ecosystem are not available on GitHub. 2019 was the year that I built my first WordPress plugin and my first browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

• Share to Microsoft Teams – is a WordPress plugin that can be added to any WordPress site, it adds a floating button to the side of the window and allows anyone to share your content to Microsoft Teams without the need to copy and paste the URL.
• Share to Teams – is a browser extension currently available for Microsoft Edge and waiting for being published on Chrome that allows you to share any page to Microsoft Teams by clicking in a button.
• Submit MVP Activity – is a browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome that helps Microsoft MVPs submitting activities, by clicking on the browser button the extension opens the submission form partially filled.

Events and speaking engagements

In 2019 I missed some of the events that I had in my list but on the other hand I have attended others that I had not planned at all and reveled to be fantastic.

In total I have attended 10 events during the year, 6 of those as a speaker in 5 different countries and 7 different cities.

• MVP Summit – USA / Seattle
• SharePoint Conference – USA / Las Vegas
• Collab Summit – Germany / Wiesbaden
• Teams Air Lift – Netherlands / Amsterdam
  
• Ask the Experts – Microsoft Teams Edition (Virtual Event) (Speaker)
• Insider Dev Tour (Speaker) – Portugal / Lisbon
• Porto.Data (Speaker) – Portugal / Lisbon
• Microsoft Teams Developer Bootcamp (Speaker) – Spain / Madrid
  
• SharePoint Saturday – Portugal / Lisbon
• Global Microsoft 365 Developer Bootcamp (Speaker) – Portugal / Lisbon

Community contributions

Did a few contributions on community initiatives during 2019, namely the CompartiMOSS magazine where I got an article published this year on issue 40 and the SharePoint Dev Weekly where my articles were mentioned 9 times. With so many appearances, Vesa Juvonen is getting better pronouncing my name, if you don’t know what I’m talking about check this out.

• Episode 27 – Deploy Google Analytics globally on modern SharePoint
• Episode 28 – Deploy Application Insights globally on modern SharePoint
• Episode 36 – How to add Google tag manager globally to SharePoint Online
• Episode 49 – Add a Share to Microsoft Teams button to your SharePoint sites
• Episode 50 – Share SharePoint list and library items to Microsoft Teams
• Episode 51 – How to easily deploy the list view formatting templates built by the community
• Episode 52 – How to create a Tile view on modern SharePoint lists
• Episode 53 – Save a modern SharePoint list as a template
• Episode 63 – How to change the page layout on a modern SharePoint page

2020 Goals

2020 is just a few hours away but I have already a few goals for the New Year and I will come back to this section of the post in about 365 days to let you know how it went.

To start the new decade I would like to:

• Do more videos on my YouTube channel, I did exactly 0 videos in 2019!!!
• Speak in at least 5 events
• Attend Microsoft Ignite again and I’ll try to do it as a speaker
• Double the blog numbers and reach 500k visitors
• Produce more content about Microsoft Teams development
• Review the Readme of all my GitHub projects
• Reply to the blog comments more often, If you are still waiting for a reply I’m really sorry

Finally yet importantly a big THANK YOU for all your support, see you in 2020.