This day, October 21, 2019 is a special day for me. I just realized that I had been blogging about SharePoint for ten years just this day. Ten years have gone since I started, it’s crazy how time flies. Ok, I don’t write blog posts all day longs, it’s more about one post per month, but anyway 10 years is 10 years!
Right now, that I’m think and write about this, many thoughts come to my mind, so much has happened in these ten years, but let me step back to my first post to get some perspectives. The first post had the title “Hello World”, you can find it here: The first hello world post
Back in this day, at that moment when I wrote this post, I attended the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. I remember that I felt I was in the SharePoint heaven together with 7000 other SharePoint nerds and brand the new version (2010) was the coolest stuff I’ve ever seen, and I was so inspired by the presentations of speakers like Heather Solomon, Asif Rehmani, Dustin Miller among more dudes, you know, people I looked up to for their skills and thought they were great and read all the blogs and books etc.
Back then, I had already worked with SharePoint in earlier version for quite a long time, but something happened back in 2009, the community started to explode, and SharePoint was hype up and all the customers needed our consultant services and there was a lot of interesting projects all around. New possibilities for SharePoint development arrived on the client side with the new client-side model and that was great news for me, since I have a background as a web designer and loved JavaScript and such tech stuff on the front end side.
Inspired as I was these days, I decided to start blogging and contribute to the community. It was such fun these days where I’ve had the chance to meet extraordinary SharePoint dedicated people and had some amazing opportunities. My blogging and other projects in the community opened some stuff for me, and I got the chance to travel around the word as I started to speak at conferences myself. A lot happened since the following year, I wrote a book as co-author with Göran Husman; Beginning SharePoint Administration for Wrox publishing, I got nominated as a Microsoft MVP back in 2011 and I started up my own company and much more. I do think that my community activities such as blogging, and teaching has shaped me to be a bit better human being, I now got a better understanding how to influence and help other people which to me is the most important of all.
Ten years laters
This day, ten years later I’m in Singapore where I attend the aOS conference as a speaker, and tonight I’m heading to the aOS conference in Kuala Lumpur. Just like when I wrote my first post, I am also now, exactly 10 years later even now at a SharePoint conference and writing on a blog post. I hope I get the opportunity to post a follow-up to this post in 10 years from now, maybe then at another conference in another country.
From my session in Microsoft Singapore about front end developing in SharePoint Online, including stuff like Theme, Site Design, SPFx web parts & Extensions.
Blog stats
At this moment I got 1.024.004 views & 805 comments for my blog. The top day was at July 3, 2012 with 1.245 views in one day. My top post, all time was “Customizing SharePoint 2010 global navigation with Css and jQuery – Part III” with 102.866 Views and this post has 94 comments. More fun facts, the top search query is: “SharePoint 2010 hide quick launch”. Now reading these stats, it’s really motivates me to keep on going and produce more posts and I hope I’ll get back with a follow up on this post in ten years from now, well let’s see about that.
Highlights over this years
Ten years is a long time indeed, and I cannot cover it all up, but here’s some photos, scattered from some of these years:
Promoted Görans Husmans & my book “Beginning SharePoint Administration 2010”, here in Las Vegas 2012
In the year of 2013, the third MVP ring arrived
From SharePoint Saturday in Dubai 2014
SharePoint nerds & friends from MVP Summit 2014 in Redmond Seattle
This year, ESPC was in my hometown, Stockholm Sweden, 2015
Me & Dipti from aOS in Bangalore India, 2017
From September 2019, Jens Weil, David Opdendries and I organized SharePoint Saturday in Stockholm
October 2019, ten years after my first blog post, here in Kuala Lumpur, Microsoft aOS together with SPFx-Xtofor
Inspiration
Do you want to start blogging? It’s great fun and will improve your technical skills as well as you skills in communication but first, be sure to love what you do and write about this, otherwise it’s easy to get tired over the time and you’ll lose your interest in blogging. Try to find your strengths and stick to that, avoid write stuff about things that you may don’t have full interest too, just be honest in what you do and what you think is fun. Try not to write the same stuff that everyone else does, find your own way and write based on your own experience and learn from questions and comments that will come.
Take care and stay in tune for more blog posts in the future!
Me & My SharePoint [FrontEnd] 