On April 1st I was notified that I was awarded Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP. To say I was excited would be an understatement. But to really understand how cool it is to me I have to take you back a few years.
About five or six years ago I didn’t even know what a MVP was. I was attending my first conference, System Center Universe here in Houston. Johan Arwidmark, Cameron Fuller, Pete Zerger, Anders Bengsston and more all presented. I vaguely knew some of these guys names from blogs or books, but I had no idea that they traveled around presenting too. But even more importantly they are all very humble and approachable.
After that I knew I wanted to try my hand at blogging and maybe even speaking. Even when I started out on helpdesk I never had any problem sharing anything I learned with my coworkers. That said we did have a sys admin who didn’t want to share pretty much anything he knew with any of us. I worked with him for 4.5 years and learned more in 1 year with another sys admin than the entire time I worked with the other sys admin. Also if you read my 10 year anniversary post last year, you also know that I’ve literally learned everything I know from following other peoples blogs. As very few companies I’ve ever worked for offered to send me to training or even conferences for that matter.
To say that sharing knowledge and experience is important to me would be an understatement. At a consulting company I worked for, I once had a practice architect ask me “whats the value in you blogging” or something along those lines. I told him if it even helped one person its worth it. But his statement also blew my mind. The only reason I knew of Catapult is because Cameron Fuller, Jason Sandys, others all blogged under the catapult domain. This was after I offered to blog under the companies website, for free, to help bring us in more business.
Thank You
While I’m honored to receive the award, I want to thank a bunch of people who helped. Ryan Durbin and Stephen Leuthold for running HASMUG and for giving me opportunities to speak. Donnie Taylor for nominating me and putting up with my twitter DMs. Wahid Saleemi for writing me a recommendation. Shaun Cassells for helping me be a better presenter. All the other community members already mentioned for inspiring me to share my knowledge as well.
Whether or not I get renewed, I’m honored and will continue to share my knowledge on this blog and other places as well.