We're close to wrapping up 2025, and just like last years I'll do a little look back and think about what 2026 might have in store for me.
2025
It feels like 2025 was the year when things settled down a bit, and everything was a continuation of what had been started before. Yet, there were also some significant achievements in 2025!
Professionally, with Qubix, it has been an incredibly challenging year. We will probably not achieve our financial targets, nor what we set as a target for growth in the number of employees. We know the reasons for this and have accepted it, but it's a bit unfortunate and we'll adjust accordingly for 2026. There have been numerous setbacks for the "exciting big project that would lead to a product", not all of them controllable or influentiable by us. And as you can imagine, it hasn't really helped for our goals of the year. Luckily, we are certain to turn this around for 2026!
On the positive side, Qubix expanded into The Netherlands by taking over AppReef. We are excited about what we can achieve with this company and on this new market! It has already taken quite some time of mine, but it's a fun new challenge to work on.
The story continues in my personal life. After 10 years living in the house we built ourselves, we are soon running out of big projects to do to finally finish the damn thing. In 2025, we finally finished the kids' bedrooms. But like with the garden last year, my involvement was limited as we got professionals to take care of the building and my partner to handle the personal touches.
Put in some stairs, and finished up the upper-part of the kids' rooms.
Building Lego slowed down a lot. Mostly because my kids are now building a lot of their own sets without my help, and I haven't had as much time as I wanted to spend on my own sets. However, I did finish Bumblebee, Darth Vader helmet, the iconic Wooden Duck, and almost (9 bags left!) completed The Lord of the Rings: Rivendellâ„¢. That last one is an amazing building experience, and I've been postponing finishing it because of that!
Some Lego from this year
I think I spent more time with my family the past year. The kids are growing up, they have their own hobbies and are building their own lives. I'm grateful I can spend them with them at soccer, dances, and other things they enjoy.
We also took a couple of shorter trips to amusement parks, movies, etc., as well as two big vacations: one to Legoland Billund and to Athens (Greece). The last one was particularly important for us, as I finally asked my partner to marry me. After 16 years, a house, 2 kids, and a lot of shared history, it was long overdue. Oh, and she said "yes" too.
2025 was also my 7th year in the Microsoft MVP program, and soon I'm turning into an old-timer... Only another 7 years to go until the rings no longer fit on the award.
The way I try to contribute back to the community has not significantly changed over the last few years, but some things are still very remarkable:
- I didn't blog, at all. Don't know what happened here for a whole year. I never felt the urge, never felt like I was missing out.
- My open source projects are still alive and plenty popular. I haven't made changes to spfx-msgraph-peoplesearch or spfx-lightbox-image-gallery, but they are still widely used. I might need to give them a toolchain update in 2026, now that SPFx got many improvements.
The azuredevops-buildagents repo is still plenty active, and gets maintenance releases if/when needed. - It's been an amazing year again in private and public feedback programs, sharing my opinions with various Product Groups within Microsoft. I use all opportunities possible for that, I'm sure much to the annoyance of some of my favorite program managers 😉.
- Got on stage again and thus needed to travel, did content selection, and attended conferences. It's been quite the year.
There were 10 events that put me on stage, and I attended MVP Summit in Seattle as well as Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco. I delivered 14 sessions, of which 10 were unique and new sessions. One event happened in Belgium, so I got to travel for 11 of them and do a little tourist-y/sightseeing too.
It's becoming more routine now. Yet every single time, I'm still honored to be selected and allowed to represent their conference and share my knowledge. A heartfelt thank you to all of the organizers who take a chance on me!
After three years of behind-the-scenes support to Vivian and her amazing Cloud Tech Tallinn conference, I finally leaped to join as a co-organizer. It required me to apply for Estonian e-citizenship, co-own half a company in Estonia, and take actual responsibility... A lot of thanks to Vivian for trusting me enough to share her passion project with me!
I hope to have some positive influence on the conference this way, and help out more than I was able to before. The 2026 edition promises to be the biggest and best one yet (tickets still available), maybe a tiny bit because of my help. And we aren't planning to stop, more news soon!
Looking at what I wrote down above, maybe 2025 wasn't as dull as I thought it was! Plenty of things happened and I very much enjoyed (most of) it. Thanks a lot to everyone that had a part in this, I appreciate you all.
2026
I never do targets or resolutions, just some tiny things I'd like to achieve in the next year:
- Get Qubix back on track for the future, stabilize the current situation and potentially achieve a little growth in 2026. For The Netherlands market the goals are a bit more ambitious, to grow the team and the number of customers.
- I'm still paying for the blog hosting. Maybe posts will follow, or maybe they don't.
- Keep prioritizing family. We are fortunate enough to do what we do, and we need to enjoy it as much and as long as possible.
- Lego. The list of unopened sets is similar to last year, and I'm proud I haven't grown it too much in 2025. Let's first build what we have left, and then see where it takes us. On the backlog for me are NASA Artemis Space Launch System, Hogwarts Express™ – Collectors' Edition, and Game Boy. For my daughter, I still have The Ice Castle and The Little Mermaid Royal Clamshell but she's still not old enough to enjoy them.
- Putting the same passion and energy into the Microsoft community as I have done before. As a conference organizer for Cloud Tech Tallinn, and hopefully still speaking too from time to time.
If I can make 2026 as good as 2025, I'll be pretty happy again by the end of it. Now it's time to sign off and see y'all around somewhere in the world!