A Year of Diverse Content Creation - Dev Retro 2025
Essay·

A Year of Diverse Content Creation - Dev Retro 2025

2025 retrospective and plans for 2026

It's time to write my annual retrospective and make some plans for 2026.

Plans For 2025 Versus Reality

Like I did last year, here are the goals I set for 2025 and what actually happened.

Organize 4 meetups for MTG:Bordeaux

Create a website for MTG:Bordeaux

Create a talk (for a meetup or developer conference) about devcontainers

Present at least 2 different talks at developer conferences

Create 4 YouTube videos about a developer tool or technology

Obtain the official Vue.js certification

Reach 2k followers on LinkedIn and 1k on Bluesky

Migrate my personal website to Nuxt Content v3 and finalize the public speaking section

Improve the Pulumi Azure Workshop with a section about using existing infrastructure

Develop a 1-day Pulumi training course

Build a small application using Dapr and running in Azure Container Apps

Lots of goals I did not achieved this year, yet I feel I have been pretty busy so what did I do in 2025?

Diversifying My Content Creation: Blog, YouTube, LinkedIn, Podcasts

I had a productive beginning of the year on my blog with several articles about Aspire, .NET and Nuxt.

However, I didn't keep up the pace and shifted my focus to learning about AI coding assistants, particularly GitHub Copilot. AI coding assistants, AI agents, and MCP servers are having a significant impact on software development and are personally transforming the way I work. This field is evolving rapidly (even by IT standards) so I need to keep learning to stay up to date.

To share what I learn, I diversified my content creation efforts and started making short YouTube videos about GitHub Copilot. While tools like Cursor and Claude Code generate a lot of buzz for their innovations, many people don't realize that GitHub Copilot has also evolved massively and now offers similar features along with access to a wide range of models. Videos felt like a natural way to demonstrate what's possible with AI through GitHub Copilot. I quickly discovered that creating videos (even short ones) requires significant effort and additional skills, making it harder to get started than I expected. However, it allows me to reach a different audience and share knowledge in a more visual format, so I plan to continue creating videos in 2026.

YouTube channel

I was already active on LinkedIn, but not in a consistent manner. Starting in September 2025, and following the example of people like Manon Amalric (whom I thank for her helpful tips), I began posting every workday—sharing tips, resources, and thoughts about cloud, GitHub Copilot, and developer experience. Even if I plan most of my posts in advance, it's quite time-consuming to create all this content on LinkedIn but it's rewarding to see the engagement and discussions it generates. It's a bit random what resonates with people, it's not always the posts I spent the most time on that get the most engagement. Nevertheless, posting regularly greatly improved my content performance and is something I intend to continue doing in 2026.

LinkedIn content performance

For the first time, I participated in a podcast "Dev dev dev .net" hosted by Richard Clark where I joined fellow IT professionals to discuss news and IT technologies, mostly in the Microsoft ecosystem. Thanks, Richard, for inviting me. I truly enjoyed being part of these two episodes and look forward to participating again in 2026.

Involvement in the local tech communities

In 2025, I kept growing the meetup group Microsoft Tech Group Bordeaux I started with Christian Bonnaud and Xavier Noya in 2024:

During this year, I was also involved in the creation of "La grappe numérique" which is the gathering of Bordeaux's digital communities. The goal is to create synergies between the different communities, share resources, solve common challenges, and organize joint events. We organized our launch event in September with attendees from more than 30 different communities and the announcement of the shared website which lists all the tech communities in Bordeaux and their upcoming events. We were also present on a dedicated community booth at the BDX I/O developer conference in November.

What's Next For 2026?

For 2026, I'll revisit some of the goals I didn't achieve last year while also tackling new ones:

  • Organize 4 meetups for MTG:Bordeaux
  • Create a website for MTG:Bordeaux
  • Be a speaker at 2 developer conferences
  • Attend MVP Summit in Seattle
  • Reach 2k followers on LinkedIn and 1k on Bluesky
  • Keep posting regularly on LinkedIn and reach 350k total views
  • Create a series of YouTube videos about GitHub Copilot (at least 5 videos)
  • Write at least 12 articles on my blog
  • Add aditional prompts, instructions and agents to my Copilot Goodies open source GitHub repository
  • Create a tool to manage easily the GitHub repositories I starred
  • Build a small application using Dapr and running in Azure Container Apps

On a personal level, I also have important projects for 2026 so I hope to find a good balance between work, content creation, and personal life. If some of my tech 2026 goals are not achieved but my personal life goes well and I keep learning and sharing, I will consider it a successful year anyway.

To Conclude

Enjoy 2026 and keep learning.

The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not represent those of my employer or any other third-party views in any way.

Copyright © 2026 Alexandre Nédélec. All rights reserved.