Last week I had a catchup meeting with a client about the progress of a platform I'm building for them, and showed them how the "devops" side of things works. Demoing it really struck me how insanely awesome all the tooling we have nowadays is, and also how much I take it for granted!

Now that .NET Oxford is going virtual for the time being during the COVID-19 lockdown, we'll be using Zoom for next few meetups. The first one is next week where we have Mark Rendle talking about Roslyn!

Early on in September, I was having a conversation on Twitter with Gregor Suttie, and he mentioned that he and Richard Hooper were planning an Azure Advent Calendar this year, and asked if I was interested in participating. The plan being for members of the Azure community to each create a video about a particular topic in Azure. Then they'd publish 3 videos per each day of December on the Azure Advent Calendar YouTube channel.

Over two and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about starting .NET Oxford. I started it with good friend and ex-colleage, Matt Nield. Since then, .NET Oxford has grown to be a thriving community in Oxfordshire. We've had a wide variety of talks and speakers - ranging from famous names like Jon Skeet and Uncle Bob, to first-time speakers who have never been on stage before! And some of those first-time speakers might never have ever gotten on stage if it hadn't been for the .NET Oxford community! It's facts like this that really make starting a user-group worthwhile!