Every year feels busy, but 2025 felt dense. Not just full, but layered. Big professional moments stacked on top of deep technical work, knowledge sharing, community connection, and some very real constraints around time, energy, and priorities. Looking back, this was a year of saying yes to opportunities I never imagined having, while also learning where I simply couldn’t do everything at once.

This is my attempt to slow the year down, take stock of what actually happened, and reflect on what it all meant.

Taking the Stage (More Than Once)

One of the most surreal highlights of 2025 was how often I found myself standing on stages I once sat in front of.

Speaking on the main stage at HashiConf is still hard to wrap my head around. HashiConf has always been that conference for anyone serious about Terraform and infrastructure as code, and to not only speak there but do a book signing was something I never would have predicted when I started posting YouTube videos from my home office. That experience alone would have made the year feel complete.

Then there was Microsoft Ignite. My first Ignite and as an FTE too! That would have been special enough, but getting to speak there — on my favorite talk so far, Learn Infrastructure as Code Through Minecraft — was a total surprise. It was mind-blowing. A genuine dream-come-true moment. Standing on that stage, realizing I was there not just attending but contributing, was one of those moments that sticks with you.

I also spoke at KCDC this year, and I finally got to see what all the hubbub was about. It really is a special conference. The energy, the people, the sense of fun mixed with serious technical depth — it was an absolute blast, and I loved every minute of it.

Closer to home, speaking at local conferences like CodeMash and Stir Trek continues to be incredibly meaningful. There’s something uniquely rewarding about connecting with the local Ohio tech community, seeing familiar faces, and being reminded that community isn’t just global and online — it’s right here.

Mastering Terraform and Giving Back at HashiConf

2025 was also a big year for Mastering Terraform. The book crossed the 2,500 copies sold mark, which is still a little surreal to write down. The book was published on July 26, 2024 so we’re still under one and a half years.

When I started working on it, my goal was simple: create something practical and approachable that would genuinely help people get better at shipping software with Terraform — that covered all three clouds with equal coverage so that I could meet the reader where they are.

Seeing that many people choose to spend their time — and money — on the book is incredibly humbling.

Giving away a Terraform book at HashiConf is like giving away water during the Boston Marathon

One of the highlights of the year was the book signing at HashiConf. It’s always a blast to engage with the community in person, put faces to names, and hear how people are actually using the material. Getting to give away around 100 free copies of the book made it even more special.

That moment felt less like a personal milestone and more like a shared celebration of the community that’s grown around Terraform. I loved meeting all the new people and hearing what they were doing with Terraform. I hope they find my book useful on their journey! I’m truly honored that HashiCorp supported the book in this way.

A Year of Numbers (And What They Actually Mean)

I track metrics not because numbers are the goal, but because they help me understand reach and impact. They’re a proxy for how many people I might be helping.

On YouTube, Azure Terraformer crossed 7,102 subscribers this year, with 81,000 views, 4,000 watch hours, and 1,500 new subscribers. Crossing the 7,000 mark felt huge, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who’s been along for the ride.

Blogging

Medium was another big area of growth. The Azure Terraformer publication reached 594 followers with over 49,000 views and 19,000 reads. On my personal Medium account, I ended the year with 933 followers, 235 subscribers, and some truly wild numbers: 370,900 presentation views, 80,900 views, and nearly 30,000 reads, with 657 new followers and 228 new subscribers added this year alone.

Blogging turned into a much bigger part of my workflow than I expected. On marktinderholt.com, there were 20.3K views, 14.6K active users, and 14.7K new users. I published a whopping 135 new articles. Azure-terraformer.com added another 6,000 views and 1,000 active users.

Overall, compared to last year’s blog numbers this represented roughly a 700–800% increase over 2024. That still surprises me.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn also played a major role in content distribution and engagement. The Azure Terraformer LinkedIn page grew to 26,269 followers and generated 637,000 impressions, completely dwarfing my personal profile, which ended the year at 9,024 followers with nearly 3 million impressions. I’ve intentionally used the Azure Terraformer page not just to share my own work, but to amplify other voices in the Azure, Terraform, and cloud computing space. That part matters to me.

The numbers are fun. You gotta celebrate the milestones. I recognized that early on when I celebrated my first 100 subscribers on YouTube.

More than anything, they remind me how many people I might be reaching with ideas that started as scribbles in a notebook or half-formed thoughts during a late-night coding session.

At the end of the day, it’s about helping people use Azure more effectively and be successful with whatever they’re building in the cloud.

Pressing Pause on YouTube (And Why It Was Necessary)

Early in the year, I made a deliberate decision to pause YouTube content creation. I was working on my first Udemy course, and something had to give.

That course launched on January 16th while I was at CodeMash in Sandusky, which still feels a little poetic. The response completely exceeded anything I expected. In 2025 alone, Udemy reached 6,431 students, with 5,459 active learners and over 1.4 million minutes taught. The feedback has been incredibly humbling.

Knowing that people find the course genuinely helpful on their Azure Terraformer journey means more to me than I can easily put into words. I can’t believe that through this course I have connected with so many people around the world!

The harder part came afterward. Once the course was finished, work at my day job (at Microsoft) ramped up in a big way. Long hours became the norm, and I never quite found my way back to my old YouTube rhythm.

If you’re already working overtime for your day job, it comes down to doing YouTube or spending time with your family. For me, the choice is clear: Family comes first.

At the same time, blogging had quietly woven itself into how I work. I started blogging in late 2024 as a way to “feed the funnel” for YouTube — write posts, then turn them into videos. Any little nugget of any idea that I stumbled across I wrote down and expanded. It helped me learn out loud and get my thoughts together and sometimes just journal — they weren’t all slam dunks. Sometimes I failed and needed to vent about why things should be done differently — even though, as a lowly engineer at Microsoft, I lack the positional power to enact the change that I think is necessary.

The good news was that I wrote a lot. The bad news was that I never followed through on converting those posts into videos.

Previously, YouTube was the thing. I published twice a week for a full year, then slowed to once a week. Once you pause, it’s surprisingly hard to restart that cadence. Blogging, on the other hand, became almost too easy. I constantly had drafts queued up, ready to finish, and I never ran out of things to write about.

I really miss YouTube. I miss the format, the creative constraint, and the direct connection it creates. I’m hopeful that 2026 will bring a little more space to get back to it.

Growing Beyond Just My Own Voice

One of my goals with the Azure Terraformer Medium publication was to make it bigger than me. This year, contributors like Matt White, Jared Holgate, and especially Sarah Lean published articles, and I’m grateful for every one of those contributions. Sarah, in particular, contributed heavily.

That said, I still haven’t diversified the publication as much as I’d like. Long term, I want to be a minor contributor, not the primary one. Hopefully that doesn’t mean I write less — it just means I need to recruit more voices. That’s a good problem to have.

A Career Shift Inside Microsoft

Internally, 2025 brought significant change. A re-org shifted my role and opened up new opportunities. I transitioned out of a more introspective quality improvement role, where I focused on cross-cutting architectural and platform issues around resiliency, security, and operability.

One of the highlights was working on Engineering Thrive, an EVP-level initiative where I worked on a “squad” lead by the CTO of Azure Core, Marcus Fontoura. The goal was to influence how Microsoft does deployments across the entire company, and being part of that effort was incredibly energizing. I got to work closely with people I deeply respect, icons at Microsoft in their own right, including Alex Frankel, David Fowler, and Anthony Martin.

During that project, I built my first MCP server, which controlled an internal deployment platform called EV2. It was a fascinating problem space and a huge learning experience, both technically and organizationally.

That work kicked off just as my team was reassigned to a top-priority initiative from Satya Nadella for a new, as-yet-unannounced product. I wish I could’ve stayed on the EngThrive initiative but I was already committed to this new product team. Something had to give.

However, the transition finally gave me the opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: build an Azure Resource Provider. Working on backend ARM APIs and Azure Portal blades was eye-opening, and I’m excited to see the first version of the product released. With any luck, more on that in 2026.

This is also the biggest reason my content output slowed. Between this product, everything else, and family life, I only had a few extra hours to dedicate to content creation. Family comes first, so something really had to give.

Terraform, Minecraft, and a Hackathon Win

Somewhere in the middle of all the seriousness, there was also room for play.

This year, the Terraform provider for Minecraft placed third in the Microsoft Global Hackathon, and I’m still smiling about it. What started as a fun idea turned into a surprisingly deep project. I added all sorts of new resources, from spawning mobs like pink sheep and buff baby zombies to managing more complex block types like stairs, chests, and beds. It turns out Minecraft is a surprisingly rich domain for thinking about infrastructure abstractions.

The Minecraft provider has become one of my favorite open source projects I’ve ever worked on. It’s playful, a little ridiculous, and technically interesting all at the same time.

More importantly, it feels like a way of giving something back. If this project sparks joy, curiosity, or even a career path for the next generation of cloud engineers, then it’s absolutely worth it.

Infrastructure as code doesn’t have to be boring — in fact, its rediculously fun! Even when you’re not automating Minecraft!

I ended up writing a lot of code — mostly Terraform modules or samples. I wish the code I write at Microsoft were actually in these numbers because I’m confident my top language would actually be C#!

Goals for 2026

Looking ahead, I want to be more intentional about where I put my energy.

I want to write more code. Not just for work, but for the joy of building things again.

I want to make a bigger impact at Microsoft by helping ship something meaningful and by leaning into the influence and responsibility that comes with the work I’m doing.

I want to bring YouTube back in a sustainable way. Not necessarily at the breakneck pace I once kept, but consistently enough that it feels alive again.

Alongside that, I’d love to create another Udemy course — or maybe even two — building on what I learned from the first one and going deeper where it makes sense.

Perhaps a second edition of my book Mastering Terraform?

Just as importantly, I want to take better care of myself. Physically, that means running, riding, and lifting weights with some regularity instead of treating exercise as an afterthought. Mentally, it means slowing down enough to practice mindfulness and commit to meditating at least 15 minutes a day. That space matters more than I’ve been willing to admit.

Have I learned how to say no? Probably not as well as I should! I don’t think I can be the kind of person that just does one thing. That’s okay but I do need to remember what matters most and let go when the time is right. Having goals that stretch you are stressful but that’s also part of the fun!

Looking Ahead

2025 stretched me. It challenged my assumptions about how much I could juggle and forced me to make intentional tradeoffs. It also gave me moments I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career.

If 2026 brings a little more calm, I hope it brings clarity too — about what to build, what to share, and what to let go of.

To everyone who read my book, watched a video, liked a post, took my course, came to a talk, or simply reached out to say thanks: I see you, and I’m grateful.

Here’s to whatever comes next.