Hello world! Welcome to my corner of the internet! I'm writing this at the beginning of the new year (2026), and as cringe as it seems, I've created a list of new years resolutions. One of those resolutions was to get out of my head and start a personal blog. So reader, if you are reading this, know that I have succeeded. Over the years I've learnt so much from other developers who've shared their thoughts online. People like Simon Willison, Armin Ronacher and Cassidy Williams, to name a few. I've also written, or shall I say ranted, quite a lot on social media. Mainly when I've felt moved by a topic, or just wanted to be funny (I have considered becoming an amateur comedian in the past.) Sharing my thoughts online like this has helped me connect with so many incredible people. The only problem is, social media posts are hard to refer back to and difficult to string together. With all of this in mind, on this beautiful sunny morning, I opened up VS Code, plugged in Claude Opus 4.5 and did I what I've been threatening to do for months—created this website.

Some of you may be frowning right now, assuming this blog post is vibe written and spiritually bankrupt. As a disclaimer, I used a Claude model with GitHub Copilot to build this site. I did not use an LLM to write (despite the em dash) and I don't intend to anytime soon. The use of AI is still a pretty contentious topic. AI Skeptics (that I hear a lot from on Bluesky) and Hyper AI Maximalists (many of which can be found on Twitter) often tend to be the loudest. In reality, I think most of us fall somewhere in the middle. Part of my hope with this blog is to try and look at lots of different perspectives and decide for myself whats true or not.

Before I switched careers into tech, I studied Molecular Biology at small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. I spent many evenings conducting small experiments to verify what was in my text books, and also looking for anything new or interesting. I didn't like being in a lab but I liked this approach! I've seen a few people in tech, like my friend Johno Whitaker, that embody this sciencey vibe, but I'd like to see more! I've created a 'tiny experiments' tag and feed for this exact purpose🧪

My Year in Review

For the rest of this blog post I'll be sharing my year in review. 2025 was a very full year for me. Lots of highs and lots of lows. I completed my first year in the UK, a country where I knew pretty much no-one. I had to figure out how to be an adult without the comfort of having family close by. I spent a lot of time alone, attending events to try make friends, exercising and working. I'm super grateful for the experience because I learned a lot about myself, my beliefs, flaws, and the world around me. More on this in the final part of the post. I've broken up my review into 2 main categories work and personal. Lets go through each of these.

Work

I'm coming up on two years working as a Python Developer Advocate for Microsoft. Most of my time was spent doing one of these three things:

• Writing Code

I spent a large amount of my time creating samples, maintaining OSS libraries, and making technical teaching content. This is my favourite part of my job! I love to write Python code and I love Open Source <3. I appreciate that so many of Microsoft's products include both!

The main OSS project I contributed to in 2025 was LangChain. I helped write code to formalise some of our processes to better track how many API calls were coming from LangChain's Python libraries to Azure. It turned out that there were a lot (billions per month!) This meant it was easier to justify directing more of our teams efforts to improving the developer experience. I got to lead a lot of those efforts. As part of this I helped create and maintain the LangChain Azure Monorepo, became a LangChain Community Champion, have almost finished creating a LangChain for Beginners course and even visited their offices in San Francisco while attending their first conference! Shout out to Harrison Chase and the LangChain team, that made contributing fun and rewarding.

Another thing I enjoyed was creating samples and content around Model Context Protocol (MCP). Last year, one of the most popular livestream tutorials I taught was with my coworker Gwen for the Lets Learn MCP Python series on the VS Code YouTube channel. The content we shared seemed to strike a chord with learners and the tutorial currently has 1k stars on GitHub! There's still a lot of skepticism around MCP, but I've found it very useful, particularly for building agentic applications that use API's I don't know or for speeding up certain tasks in VS Code.

As a final note on writing code, I continued to have an interest in Small Language Models (SLMs). I have a feeling that SLMs are criminally underutilised! Towards the end of 2025 I worked with the Foundry Local team to test and improve the capabilities of Foundry Local (Microsoft's equivalent of something like Ollama, that allows you download and use local models.) I made a Local Email Agent that uses the M365 MCP server to answer questions about, draft and send emails with an SLM. I think it's very good. I'm planning to run some experiments to try and compare how various SLMs perform vs proprietary models.

• Giving Talks

I gave dozens of technical talks this past year. I kicked off 2025 in Johannesburg, South Africa, leading a workshop on Azure AI Agent Service. That was the first of a series of in-person talks I gave in different cities around the world including New York, Chicago, St Maarten, Paris, Lisbon, London, Frankfurt, and Seattle. I especially loved keynoting DjangoCon US, and speaking at AI Engineer Paris, where I got to meet some of my fellow Dev advocates/Devex engineers (Dan, Leonie, Merve, Patrick, VB, Tuana and Bilge! The group chat was poppin off!!!) I'm really proud of the talks I gave and thankful for the friendships that I've made in the industry.

On the virtual side of things I did a lot of streaming on Microsoft's various YouTube channels. I also launched a YouTube show called Python on Azure with my teammate Gwen, where we interview people we think are doing interesting things in the Python space. Our guest list this past season included Armin Ronacher, Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav, Sydney Runkle, and the one and only Guido Van Rossum! Right at the end of the year we also did a special holiday episode with our Microsoft Python Advocacy team! You can find the full playlist here.

There are two tech events I think are worth mentioning that I didn't speak at but got to attend in person. The first was the Association for Computing Machinery Practitioner Board meeting. This was my first year co-chairing the board. I'm very grateful to the awesome Scott Hanselman for nominating me to join a few years ago. I've loved volunteering for the ACM, which is the oldest computing association in the world! I got to lead the inaugural ACM Book Club discussion, where we read 'This is For Everyone' a memoir/manifesto by Tim Burners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. I can highly recommend the book, and also joining us for our next read this year.

Secondly, I'll mention that I regularly attended a weekly meetup called Gradient Descending run by Akash Bajwa in London. I loved every single event and got to meet people like David Sorria Para, one of the creators of MCP, who's also become a friend. I feel like I've named dropped a bit in this article but I think it's good to highlight that these events don't just provide a space for me to speak but also room to meet some of the people leading the industry. It turns out that many of them are normal human beings and nice ones too! Meeting Microsoft teammates at conferences was another perk. At PyCon US I got to meet my manager Anthony, my colleagues Pamela, Sarah, Rohit (when he was still at the company), and Guido (who works for Microsoft too lol!)

• Sharing feedback with our product teams

The last major formal work thing I'll mention is sharing feedback with product. One of the functions of our team is to help the product teams improve by sharing opinions we have from building ourselves or from what we see online or at conferences. Our team focused a lot on VS Code and Github CoPilot, and working with these product teams was really fun! I found twitter to be a good resource for tracking what people were struggling with or enjoying. For Agentic Coding I followed Mario Zechner and Peter Steinberger
who I think have been leaders in this space. I worked with other product teams, like our Azure Blob Storage and Azure AI Search teams outside of this but mainly to help them with LangChain integrations. Besides product teams I also got to work with a number of the content creation teams at Microsoft. One of the videos I recorded with them at Build has over 1million views on Tick Tock!

All of this made for a very productive year! I will say that there were times when I struggled. Microsoft had several rounds of layoffs and each time they did I felt drained. I also found that in a large company objectives aren't always neatly aligned. I had to work a bunch on my self esteem because advocacy is such an external facing role, and you have to interact with developers who sometimes like you and sometimes don't. Overall, most things pushed me to see myself more clearly, accept myself, and grow! I really appreciate the friends I've made along the way!

Personal

This blog post is turning out to be longer than expected so I'll make this section short and maybe expand on some things in future posts. Some highlights from the year were that my best friend and my sister both got married in 2025! Along with this, my twin brother got engaged, and my younger brothers wife gave birth to their third. These were really exciting moments to be part of but definitely influenced me to download Hinge for the first time in ages (I was on there for a few months, and then abandoned the whole thing after some bad dates lol.) I've decided meeting someone in person is probably going to be best, though the thing I dislike most about this side of life is that it's just inherently awkward (or maybe I'm the awkward one, ha!)

I wrote earlier about some of the challenges of immigrating to a new country. By far the hardest thing has been making good, meaningful friendships. I've managed to make some friends but I'm still looking for a core group that I can really go deep with. I like tech but I'm also very interested in politics, social issues, running and pilates, laughing loudly, religious sci-fi and lots of random other things. I'm not looking for clones of myself but people I can be myself with and who can be themselves around me! One of my best friends from high school was here for a few months and it felt like such a breath of fresh air. Finding 'my people' is probably one of my top priorities for 2026.

If you've gotten this far, thank you! I'm going to try and write at least once a month but maybe more frequently if I can. If you have any thoughts feel free to leave me a comment or send me an email! Happy New Year <3