All good things must come to an end, and this week sees the end of yet another one of my side projects. Sad times!

Azure Projects

Earlier this year, I launched Azure Projects - a subreddit aimed at providing an organised list of Azure project ideas, provided by the community.

Whilst initially it received some fantastic project submissions, I eventually realised that relying on other people's time and effort to keep it afloat was ultimately a dead-end. Time is a precious commodity, and asking others to give up their own time to support by side-project was a big ask. I realise that now.

The Azure Projects subreddit was archived and moved to a GitHub repo, here.

Azure Pirate!

Next comes my beloved Azure Pirate! I can't recall when exactly I first launched it, but the Twitter account was first registered in May 2021.

It started off as a bit of fun as a glorified RSS feed reader come Twitter bot, with (for a reason I can't remember) a silly pirate voice.

Long story short, it has since produced 2.5K tweets from 90+ community feeds and has 1.5K followers.

These past few weeks/months have produced a lot of uncertainty regarding the Twitter APIs, a resource at the very heart of this project. Twitter released V2 of their APIs, along with different plans (see below):

This change has already tanked many Twitter based projects, including BluebirdPS, a PowerShell module I used to post the Tweets.

I was also being rate limited to 25 Tweets a day, and really struggled to find alternative SDKs to post Tweets with the Free Tier V2 APIs. I even tried the official Twitter samples - but to no avail.

I'd spent a significant amount of time and money on this project, and I'd been very reluctant to give in - but it feels like my hand was forced. The Free Tier is not fit for purpose, but the Basic Tier (which I believe would still rate limit me) is far too expensive.

Don't get me wrong, Azure Pirate was far from perfect, it required a fair bit of maintenance to fix bugs and keep on top of RSS feed changes, but I loved its quirkiness.

Sadly, I've decided to call it a day and retire the pirate! 😢

As much as I love this project, the costs and ongoing maintenance surpass the value I believe anyone derives from it.

The Twitter account has been deleted and the Azure resources destroyed.

I'll keep the RSS collection publicly open (here), should anyone else wish to make use of it.

The Cloud Beards Podcast

Myself and my good friend Karl Cooke also decided to call an end to our podcast idea, The Cloud Beards Podcast, before it even begun. Family and work commitments kept getting in the way. We plan to revisit this again at some point in the not too distant future though.

What Next?

Oh, what a miserable article this has been so far!! Why don't I just give up and go home?!

Never!!

I am still incredibly passionate about contributing to the Azure and wider Microsoft community, and have some exciting plans in the works!

Onwards and Upwards!