Another year has flown by and I've been thinking about how last year went.

In my 2023 year-in-review post, I wrote that I was ending the year on a high note, getting back into blogging after not writing a lot in recent years. I wrote 27 posts in 2024, but only 2 of those since March. I was motivated to write and it felt good to get back to it, but life got in the way.

The lowlights of my year were mostly family and personal illnesses, plus a dumbass moment!

  • I caught COVID for the first time in January.
  • I had gallbladder (removal) surgery in May.
  • I spent a lot of my time travelling back and forth to Buffalo, New York, where a relative was (eventually) placed in long-term care after having a stroke in early April. I'm her power of attorney and healthcare proxy so it's been a new experience managing someone else's affairs, complicated by the fact she is American and their financial and healthcare systems are far different from mine in Canada.
  • I missed the deadline to renew my PL-300 exam by 2 days (Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst). I received reminders, but they languished in my inbox and I missed the deadline so that certification is now gone.

The highlights were:

  • Moving in with my partner of 10 years, and selling my house. I moved in September, and we've done a good job of merging our stuff, although there are still a handful of boxes yet to be unpacked! It's so much nicer not commuting between our homes each weekend! 😀
  • An epic three-week trip on the US West Coast in March 2024. That was so much fun!
  • An MVP Award renewal, my 8th, this time in two new categories - Excel and Power BI (M365 and Data Platform respectively).
  • Passing the DP-600 exam (Microsoft Certified Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate).
  • Work-wise, I billed 7 new clients in 2024 which was great, 3 of which continue to have work for me here and there (4 of the new clients were one-off situations). However, with all the life stuff going on, my billable hours & revenue suffered as a significant amount of my time was spent on non-billable things.

Going into 2025, where I focus my time will shift compared to previous years:

  • I won't be applying for MVP Award renewal this March, it's time to let that go. I've been mostly inactive this "renewal period", and my focus needs to be on family and earning a living, for now. It's been a phenomenal experience that began in October 2016. I have no regrets.
  • I will continue to meet with my #SML friends (Saturday Morning Learning, a group of Power BI enthusiasts). We discuss and learn different things about each other and Fabric/Power BI, and it's one thing I look forward to each Saturday morning.
  • I will continue with my Dynamics GP consulting work, which I expect to decrease over time as more clients start to migrate to other ERPs. (Its end of life will be in 2029).
  • I will continue to pursue more Power BI work, but that hasn't been as easy as initially thought. Breaking into a "newer" area without a ton of hands-on experience is tough to sell, but I'm getting more inquiries which is a positive sign. I stay as up-to-date as I can between my #SML group discussions and hands-on building and tweaking my own reports.
  • In the long term, I may look at picking up contract work vs. supporting a bunch of individual clients. I started my consulting business in 2009, and up until now have been fortunate to find clients with enough moderate-sized project work to keep me busy but I'm finding that harder to do these days. I find myself doing a lot more "break-fix" work which is challenging to plan my schedule around when I don't know when I'm needed.
  • Outside of work, I want to get back to personal hobbies that I have let lapse in the pursuit and maintenance of the MVP Award: golfing, woodworking, exercising more in general, and things like that. I am challenging myself this year to a distance-based target of walking, running, cycling, skating, rowing (or any other way I can achieve "distances"!) of 2,000 or more kilometres. So far I'm 4km down, 1996km to go! LOL...

Happy New Year to all who read this, I hope you have a safe and successful 2025!