2019 has been a big year for dotNetTips.com and dotNetDave (me)! I released a new book titled Rock Your Code: Code and App Performance for Microsoft .NET early in the year and then released the second edition in September when the new version of .NET was released. I also released a new edition of my Rock Your Career: Surviving the Technical Interview. As I’m writing this, I am hard at work on a new edition of one of my books. Stay tuned for an announcement in January.

Conferences

I spoke at six events that included countries India and Mauritius along with new cities in the United States (New Hamshire and Georgia). Thanks to speaking in India, I am sure I spoke in front of over 1,000 geeks this year!

The funniest thing I got to do during my travels was in Mauritius when I got to walk with lions. Yes, real, not drugged lions in an enclosure with about 10 people and 5 handlers. This was a once in a lifetime experience that I will never forget!

Videos

I’ve released 25 new videos on Vimeo. These videos include new episodes of my Dogfooding and 256 Seconds with dotNetDave series.

Blog

For this blog, I saw the biggest traffic this year since 2014 (the biggest year so far). The top three countries are the United States, India, and the United Kingdom. It looks like most countries around the world have viewed this site, including the Vatican City!

For some reason, a post I did way back in 2004 titled Convert Bitmap to Byte Array is still the top viewed post followed by a new post for this year titled Performance Tip: for vs. foreach in Microsoft .NET. More people viewed this site in December than the other months. The top referrer to this blog was Google Search followed by Twitter. The top category on this site is Coding Standards! I’m happy to see that for sure.

C# Corner

If you didn’t know, I am one of the featured writers on the C# Corner web site. To date, my articles and other posts have been viewed almost 600K times! I wrote 18 new articles this year, three new blog posts, four new news items and published a book. I’ve also gained many new followers on Twitter and Facebook from this very popular site. My article titled Confessions Of An Angry Programmer that I wrote in 2017 continues to be my most popular with over 33K views!

Giving Back

While speaking at the C# Corner Conference this year, I had a very moving experience when three of us took a trip to an India slum to visit the Voice of Slum NGO. We learned about the NGO from the two very inspiring people that started it and they are also from the slums.

On the trip back home, I decided to donate (starting in May) all the profit from the paperback version of my new book on code performance. To learn more about my visit, please click here. I hope that you will support my effort to keep their vocation training funded by purchasing a copy of my book. I have also set up a Go Fund Me page (if you already have my book)!

I encourage you to get involved in your local tech community, I guarantee it will pay off! Actually, everything I do outside of my full-time job is geared to give back to the tech community and now helping kids in India.

Looking Forward To 2020

Even though 2020 will mark the 26th year as a full-time software engineer, I am not slowing down! At the beginning of 2020, I will release a new edition of one of my books that I’ve added almost 100 new pages and am still writing! By purchasing this book, you will be able to download, for FREE, a Visual Studio add-in that I use every day that helps me to be a more productive developer.

I will also be releasing a brand new (non-tech) book titled The Hello World Cookbook. I’ve been creating my own recipes ever since I was a cook at the age of 18. This book will feature recipes from geeks just like you from around the world. ALL proceeds will be donated monthly to the Voice of Slum NGO in India. I hope to release it by the end of the first quarter of 2020. I hope that you will support this effort by submitting one or more of your own recipes and by purchasing a copy of the book when it’s released.

Since I am decreasing the number of conferences I speak at (since most do not provide travel assistance), I will be back for the fourth year in a row to speak at the C# Corner Conference. I will also, for the second year in a row, be part of the keynote speech! I hope you will join me at one of the stops on my dotNetDave No Apologies World Tour.

I’m also looking forward to my 14th Microsoft MVP award! I will be attending the Microsoft MVP Summit in March, my all-time favorite conference! This is my chance to not only learn, but I get to hang out with my favorite MVPs from around the world.

Summary

I do hope you have learned something from all of the efforts that I make to help you, my fellow software engineers and will join me on my journey in 2020. If you have any suggestions for what you would like me to write, speak about or record on video, please make a comment below. See you in 2020!