Ok so this is just a quick blog post about receiving my recent MVP Award from Microsoft.

I realised that it had been 12 days since I received the email and apart from mentioning it on my weekly video I hadn’t actually written a blog post about it.

So I am going to go over a few things on how I came to be nominated and eventually receive this award, oh and I also just quickly made an unboxing video as the award actually got delivered to me today! So basically i’m super excited!

Background

When Covid lockdowns struck back in March 2020 we all found we had more time on our hands. Time to fill, time to be with family, time to find entertainment or use to study. Whatever the reason we all had a lot more time on our hands.

At this point for me I took the opportunity to look at my home office set up and turn it into a fun place to be as I gathered and felt that we would all be confined to our houses for a prolonged period of time…… I’m kind of glad that I wasn’t wrong in a funny way!

I had set up a new PC as a place for me to work and also work as an entertainment and learning area for my kids to utilise. It was at this point I had decided to turn my attention to learning in public and also setting up the amazing Welsh Azure User Group with some equally amazing Microsoft FTE’s as well as other Tech people from in and around the local area.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was blogging, and recording YouTube Videos, I was helping coordinate and run the WAUG monthly sessions and I was interacting with a whole new bunch of awesome people…. the community.

Where this led

After chatting with a lot of people in the community over social media I started to frequent other community user groups, and before I knew it I was 3D printing a Robot Arm and buying raspberry Pi’s and microprocessors… and a soldering Iron! All with the end goal to learn more about IoT and How it works with the Azure components. By this time I had refreshed my DevOps skills, Dug into containerisation, learns about Azure specific tech like vWAN, Arc, Enterprise Scale, Private Link, App transformation. Id dabbled with AI / ML and even build a Video Analytics solution using Nvidia Hardware Accelerated hardware.

Basically, as I look back I think not only wow…. I did this, but wow I did this in public and I shared as much of my journey as I was doing it. I started to attend a few user groups as a speaker which was new to me. I continued to blog and run the user group and I had made many friends in the community who were already MVP’s and a few were telling me that what I was doing was worthy of the award myself. I thought, noooooo, not me! Surely the MVP is for cleverer people than me.

Now forgive me, but I’m not going to call out people by name here as to be quite frank there have been so many people in the community, in my work and in my family that have been part of my journey. Of course there are certain community members that have stood out and supported me in ways they probably don’t even realise. You all know who you are and I genuinely thank each and every one of you for your help and support.

The Nomination

So after a while of working and learning with a lot of people across the community, a few MVP friends as they now were approached me to say they they would nominate me and support this for me. At this point I was hugely grateful and really didnt think the award nomination would go any further than that.

Part of the process is a catch up with the MVP Regional Lead about the contributions that I have made over the previous year and a general chat around any questions I had about the programme.

After this point I really didn’t think it would be going much further, I was just hugely honoured and humbled to have received this nomination in the first place.

The Award!

Needless to say, I was hugely shocked and humbled to receive the unbelievable news that I had been accepted as an Azure MVP. AN accolade that I am hugely honoured to receive as it kind of underlined not just the last 12 months of work i have been doing in the Community, but it also acts as that rubber stamp to all the years I have had working with Microsoft products, attending events, helping customers.

I am honoured!

This is for you mum!! xxx

I decided to just do an unboxing video! Hope you enjoy!

Thanks so much for everyone’s amazing support and help that has got me to this place! I’m so looking forward to the next 12 months! #CommunityRocks

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