2019: My year in review

In this blog post, I want to share my speaking session and speaking opportunities and other activities in this great 2019. Continue reading if you are interested.

The 2019 year was a fun and interesting year for me, I had a lot of speaking and other opportunities and event and now I want to group them all in this blog post and share them with you.

NetWork Conference (Bosnia and Herzegovina) - 03/28/2019.

The first bigger speaking activity was in March, on NetWork Conference in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the city called Neum. NetWork Conference is the biggest IT/Dev/Biz related conference in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the fun fact is that this was my first "big" conference to speak back in 2017.

On event I was speaking about Xamarin.Forms and MVVM concepts. The session went really great, had few questions and discussions about covered topics.

Overall it was a great event and a great session if you ask me. You can find more info about the event and conference here.

NT Konferenca (Portorož, Slovenia) - 05/22/2019.

In May I had two conference session at NTK (NT Conference) in a beautiful city called Portorož in Slovenia. Fun fact (again) this was my first international (English speaking) conference back in 2018.

The conference is huge, I think it is the biggest IT/DEV/Tech related one in Slovenia, and it looks very nice.
On this conference, I had delivered two successful sessions first one was about Xamarin.Forms and MVVM concepts and the second one was on how to implement push notifications with Visual Studio App Center in Xamarin.Forms mobile projects

The conference, my and other sessions, the whole atmosphere in Slovenia was great and I have enjoyed every bit of it. 😄

XamExpertDay (Munich, Germany) - 06/14/2019.

I am so happy that I was part of this event, this was one of my items in a bucket list to cross it... and I made it. ✔️

Great atmosphere, great speakers, great audience... I was surrounded by and my dear friends from European Xamarin community, all of that was in one place at Microsoft office in Munich, on a summer day in June.

I had a nice session and good discussion with the audience, and my session was about Application indexing and deep linking in Xamarin.Forms apps.

The conference topics were great, but I am happy that I had the opportunity to meet all of my colleagues and friends from the Xamarin community.

Not speaking but education-related one but... July and August was a break from conferences and speaking engagement so I was more focused on certifications, and the result of that was passing Exam 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC Web Applications in September.

XamExpertDay (Cologne, Germany) - 10/25/2019.

The second edition of XamExpertDay and I was a speaker there as well 😄, this time in Cologne.

I had a session on how to implement push notifications with Visual Studio App Center in Xamarin.Forms mobile projects.

The session went great, few people were standing whole time because there was no room to sit.

I am not happy that those people were standing but on another hand, I am also happy to see more people who are interested in topics which I am covering.
Again, I had a really great time with my friends, on speaker dinner, on the event on post-event meetings etc. The great and very positive energy was that day at Microsoft Office in Cologne!

Fun fact I was an author for this year's logo for XamExpertDay, so I am looking at this event as something special and very dear to me. I hope and looking forward to speak and meet all of these great people in 2020 editions again.

... From Cologne with love 💓

Advanced Technology Day 15 (Zagreb, Croatia) - 12/05/2019.

Last speaking session was few weeks ago, at the start of December and it was in Zagreb, Croatia on Advanced Technology Day conference. It is a community-based conference, but it is a very popular and well-visited conference in Croatia region.
My session was called "Explore all the new, hot, & awesome stuff for Xamarin developers!", where I presented all the new stuff which is coming from the Xamarin team for our community.

The session went great and I am happy that I was part of this event, the Zagreb in winter is beautiful so I had some time to enjoy the winter atmosphere in the city as well.

Those were my speaking activities, I am glad that I had the time and opportunity to speak on all of them, looking forward to repeat this again in 2020 as well.

If you ask me, I think I made some kind of impact on the community, also I hope I have reached a nice number of people and shared my knowledge about Xamarin, .NET, Azure and all other technologies that I work and speak about them.

Other worth mentioning events were:

• In January Xamarin.Forms pull request was approved and merged in the master 😄,
• I finished my first half marathon in September and took several other running races
• I lost around 13 kilograms
• I was guest on Kerry W. Lothrop's podcast in November.
• Made some samples for Prism Library Samples repository.
• I graduated from University and now I am a Bachelor of Software Engineering 🎓
• and in general, I am healthy and pretty much happy with my life (I thank God for this and everything other that happens in my life).
  

I really hope 2019 was a great year for you as well, if not I wish you all the best and hope you will have wonderful years and life in front of you.

Thank you for reading this... I promise I will write more in 2020. I can say that I really enjoy this kind of expression of my self.

Best regards!

Almir Vuk | Microsoft MVP