 Hello and welcome to another MVP Buzz Chat. My name is Krish Muckley and I'm here talking today with Leslie. Hello. Hello, everyone. Hello, Christian. How are you? This is our first time meeting. So for folks that don't know who you are, why don't you give us that background? Who you are, where you are, what you do. All right. Well, as Krish mentioned, my name is Leslie. I'm a Microsoft MVP in the developer technology category. I'm from the American Public. As a full-time developer. And I consider myself as a full-time blower, too. The name of my blog is into Spanish because my main focus is my community. That's the way I started writing about technical content, about feature and programming in general. That's where I started Dominotik.com. Were you doing stuff for work related or just things that you were interested in kind of solving problems? You had questions that you wanted to find answers for? All of it. Sometimes I'm reading something really interesting and I want to share with everybody about some books about programming, like clean code. I really like books, for example, and I try to do something about it. Or sometimes I work in the Azure and I try to share what I learn about that. And that's it. That's the most important thing in my blog. I try to put myself into a schedule. Like, I want to talk about this and this and this, but sometimes by my work and everything that I'm doing in the moment, I just change in my mind and say, okay, right now I need to write about this. You know, that's one of the things that I do with and I love OneNote 4 is because I read something or somebody's speaking on the like, just today I was doing an interview earlier today and I jotted down on a little spiral like notepad that I keep down here of two blog ideas and I'll add them over into OneNote and maybe I'll come back to them or add to it and other things, but I have that rolling list and sometimes it just, it doesn't happen. My priorities change, but you know, or other times where I'm going back like, what should I write about this time? And I'll look through that library of ideas and be like, oh, I started down something, actually, there's something I want to say about that and then put that content together. Yeah, that happened to me a lot. I'm trying to create content for my blog and also another thing that I'm thinking in town is right now I'm writing in English in the medium platform and for my blog, Dominic.com is in Spanish. So I tried to combine one topic that I think can be useful and a tactic for more people. Like a topic that is really important to people to know right now because you know, technology is changing every day and sometimes you say, okay, I'm gonna write about Azure Functions, for example, but you see some blogs and you see some, today some Twitter's and you say, right now people are talking about food practices or unit tests and so you'll switch to that because people are going to be interested in that. Yeah, that's a great question of like how, how do you balance the, I mean, because obviously there's topics out there that a lot of people are actively writing about. Nobody has your experience, nobody has, yeah, like the nuances of your profile of the customers that you work with, the stories that you have, your life experiences, even though you're writing about the same technology topic, you're gonna have a different approach to that. But do you, do you weigh that? Like, oh, there's already a lot out there, let me go write about something different or do you just write about the things that you wanna write about? I think that, I mean, is a balance, I need to take a balance on that situation. For example, some people write in a topic but they are too in a high level, like really technical for maybe people that already know about that and need some special tips. And the thing is you can make the same topic, you can create different kind of the compensation of logging like for an entry level, middle level. So, I think I'm loyal to my style of playing things and even if another people write about it, I think I can add something different that is based on my experience. But sometimes if you know that that topic is over, I mean, send blogs about that and LinkedIn, I mean, no, I don't wanna write about it because maybe the topics that I want to focus, one of them have taken it down so. Yeah, well, that's why I'm also a big fan of calling out and referencing other bodies of work, other articles. And you can almost just kind of summarize a topic if somebody else wrote and went into depth and explain that technical aspect and you can then take kind of a different direction with the rest of it. Say, hey, if you're looking to go in depth on how to build out this component, this person wrote this great article or they've got a YouTube video on that and then you can kind of take it in a different direction but kind of build off of other community content. Yeah, I think it's really important to collaborate with the community. And for me, it's really important to give the credit to people that made something that I feel inspired by. I try to be really for reference the books that I read and I find something useful because they deserve the credit of that. Even if I give something, because even if I'm writing about fling code, for example, about the book, I search for another information, I mean to add something more than what is already on the book because it doesn't make any sense to just copy everything and paste it on my blog, right? But I really want to make people to know that that is not all my idea. There's a lot of other people to talk about it and that's the point of that person, that's mine. Right. And take what you want. So I mean, developer technologies is a pretty broad category. What do you specifically focus on? Like what are you passionate about within that area? I'm a backend developer and I'm working on .NET and I'm a self-taught in .NET Core. So in my way to learn, I found some interesting topics and I grew out about it and put it on my blog and even create a course of the fundamentals of .NET Core in my YouTube channel. It's either into Spanish for my, but it's good. And that's it. I mean, I work about, I try to write about what I'm working right now. For example, I really get into Azure, like really enthusiastic about some of the services that are available for all that developer, you know, I'm not too enthusiastic about infrastructure. And I try to write about that, about Azure and services in, I mean, based on my role as a developer, something that I find useful and I start to share it and backend is a software. You know, you just made me think of something too is that, you know, there's, I mean, I'm a big advocate for education and formal education on that side, but, you know, I think it's a mistake to focus only on that aspect of it. There's plenty of people out there. You know, some of the most brilliant coders, engineers that I've worked with throughout my career, some of them didn't have any degree, some of them had other, like one, I would think of my friend, Chris, who is a VP of engineering now, had his degree in music and played with the city symphony, right, for several years and then just realized, you know, that was going to be difficult for him to have a family and, you know, and it kind of continued doing that, but he, it was always passionate about technology, but he just had a mind for it. But so my, my suggestion is, I'm a huge advocate, a community advocate as well, is that it's a great way for people that feel like they don't have the right pedigree or the right, you know, a schooling background, educational background, they can still go out there, be self-taught and learn and share and do very well. And I would even argue that somebody that has a strong community background and is plugged into that and leveraging that and giving back to the community has a much better leg up on future job prospects than even somebody that comes right out of university. Now, I know it's all a lot of things that depend. Yeah, because I have my education, like in college, I have a senior degree in software development in, I don't know if it's called the same there, but it's like an institute, it's not a college. It's previous to college, it's just for technical education. And after that, I went to college for my engineering degree. Yeah, I'm not saying that that was like your story, I just, it just made me think. Yeah, but the thing is sometimes, that's something that I try to encourage the, the other people that were studying with me. Not all that you need for being a good developer, you're going to learn it on college. You have to be clear of that. You need to learn by yourself, try to find your path and try to find the things that are really useful for you. Because sometimes the curriculum of your career is going to be really general about some topics about programming and things like that. And if you don't put yourself the idea, okay, I want to be a developer, I want to try to focus on the science or something like that, you will be an engineer at the end of your career, but you're not going to have a really deep knowledge in something that you want to get a job. Right. And get started. So one of my brother-in-laws who was self-taught and did very well, he just didn't click with a lot of school, but after years of as a developer and a front-end developer and very talented, but finally went and did like a, I don't know what you call it, it's not like a certificate program. It was very intensive full-time, but it was a technical school in person and it was like four, five months long, very intensive because he wanted to have that formal training that he never got. He wanted to understand, it was very condensed because you had to already be a professional within the space. You couldn't just like, hey, I want to learn to code. Like, no, that's not what this was. These were people that already knew, but like him wanted to have that formal structured education so that they could, he could go even further within his organization and he was able to go and find a job right out of that experience at a much higher level of pay, having completed that. So there's something to be said about, either approach there. One of the things that I love about technology though is that so much of it is like, find what you're passionate about, like in an industry or building a type of thing, like you could just find something like it where it just really clicks. There are so many different opportunities. Hey, I've been in tech for 30 years. I have a marketing degree. Yeah, so I was in marketing and on the business side, but I was just drawn to the technology field and just was passionate and found a place where I fit. Yeah, that's nice. And also that's something that I share with people that were sitting with me. You don't have to be a programmer. There's another topic that you can fit in technology. That's a really good advantage and you have a lot of opportunities. And that's something really important to share. Even for countries like me, where people don't have a lot of options to get good jobs and get a good income as a programmer. Because I know here being a programmer, well, we are being really good paid for the average of people around there. So you don't have to feel like being a developer that just learned this and this and this. You have a lot of opportunities. You have really different options that you can get and be as good as a developer. I mean, yeah, that's science or cloud architecture. I mean- Well, I was even thinking like non-technical role because I know some of the best project and product managers have that engineering background. And they didn't enjoy the engineering side, but they love the project and product creation, that process on the management side. And it's always good to have people. It was for me to be stronger than business and the marketing side to pick up the technical skills. It's the same thing. You have people that lean towards the business focus but have the technical background and there's tons of opportunities out there. You know, certainly there are a few times in my career where had I had a more formal engineering background, I would have moved up much more quickly than I did. But, you know, so there's a lot of, I'm always envious of people that have the engineering background but wanna get into the business or even the marketing side of things. I think have an advantage over the rest of us that don't have that. Yeah, yeah, it's really good. And I have a colleague from my university that he's now in the business side of technology and he's doing pretty well, so. It's a little secret that's out there for all of the recent college grads that are thinking about careers is people that have the technical training that have an aptitude towards technology. But if you're on the business side of things, you know, I think the pay scales tend to be higher than straight engineering and a lot of roles. So just, you know, just throwing that out there. You know. Yeah, sometimes the point is. I think there's more jobs that are in pure tech like more available opportunities out there for engineers, especially just in the modern era that we're in, but anyway. I'm going to take your concept after this meeting. What's funny is because many years ago I was well, just for a year, I went and worked for a company that had, you know, that was a services company and they did placement and I was kind of in that world. So it's funny as I'm still in contact with people that once in a while will reach out and be like, hey, have you heard anything about us? You know, that was 20 years ago when I was in that line of work, helping people find jobs. I was like, yeah, I can't really help now, but as far as just advice on careers, I mean, I'm like I said, 30 years in tech, I have some opinions of where you can go and find job opportunities and yeah. So reach out to me. Let me know if there's anybody that's out there watching that is wants some help on that. So. Oh, maybe me? Yeah, always happy to connect with MVPs. So yeah. So what else is, so what are you passionate about? I mean, we just had Ignite. So anything that really kind of stood out that you're really excited about? Architecture. I mean, thought architecture for me is, I mean, like my green job. I mean, I just figured out that there's a lot of things that we do in programming that can affect the performance of your architecture on the cloud. And sometimes as a developer, we are not aware of that till we are really into the architecture stuff like orchestrating the servers and pull all in that. And you find out that one server is being down for some reason and you have to find the service that is pulling it down by bad code. I'm really worried about that. And I really like to learn more about this topic. And I know it's a long way to go because architecture implies a lot of things about infrastructure, about cloud architecture and software development as well. But I'm really happy to take it. Well, that and it's constantly changing. And it's, well, having worked in, you come from the SharePoint side of things and companies moving from on-premises to the cloud. And a lot of those companies started out by just picking up and moving what we call a lift and shift of all the things that they had built for on-prem and they just moved to the cloud, talking about architecture is like, no, it's not built the same way. It's incredibly expensive to try and run the way that it was architected for on-prem out in the cloud in the way that the number of times, the number of calls, the number of services that are running, all the systems that are ahead is just, so it's just a very different way of thinking and architecture and designing the solutions that you build and run. It's, I mean, there's- Yeah, that's really excited for me to consider about all the solutions and how we can try to move to the cloud, but I mean, in the more, in the less painful way to the company. Well, there's going to be opportunity for years in working with companies, with customers, just on that problem. As they continue to transition, you know, they're, again, they're old, they're legacy systems into the cloud. That's a great place for job prospects. Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of people like independence and that's all that they do with client after client is that's it. Yeah, so I have an opportunity out there. For the Leslie of the future. Yes, exactly. Well, hey Leslie, it was really great getting to know you. I was going to say that over the last couple of months, I was really hoping that Microsoft was going to do an in-person MVP summit, but they just announced that it's going to be all online again, you know, given where we are, you know, which is unfortunate, but, you know, hopefully we, you know, we could connect and do something online at some point, you know, and for folks that want to find out more about you and get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? On Twitter, of course. Yeah. My Leslie, my handle is I less RG and also in my blog. I mean, I think that's gone. And as medium as Leslie, I mean it. And of course I'll have the links to all of those, her social and her MVP profile and her, the two blogs, the two sites, the English and Spanish out on my blog. So if you go to buckleyplanet.com and you search on Leslie, you'll be able to find her profile there on the video and the podcast and all that information. So, well Leslie, really appreciate your time and getting to know you. I think you're, in fact, I was looking through my list. I think you're the first person that I've interviewed from Dominican Republic. There, do you know how many MVPs there are? In my country. Yeah. There are eight and we are four women in the MVP program. And I mean, we have three MVPs in the same category as me and developed for technology. One of them is Lomariz Reyes. She talks about Samarit and now Maui and Charlene also. And we have a lot of MVPs. It's the MVP site does not make it easy. Like you can't go search by country. They just, Microsoft doesn't provide it like that. And unless MVPs have the words Dominican Republic in their profile, doing a search, you'll only find those that it's included there. Like there's one MVP that's listed who lives in Spain but he's originally from the Dominican Republic. Yeah. One of the reasons. Right. But it's, so it's always, it's great. Do you guys ever get together or have you talked about that? Yeah, for example, we have, we are planning to get together for an in-person meeting in this year. It's possible with all the schedule. Yeah, it's, it's difficult. Well, we, so we, we've tried. So here in where I am, I'm based south of Salt Lake City, Utah. And there are four or five MVPs that are within like a two hour radius of the area. And we've done like a, I think it's now quarterly call to try and keep in touch, but even then we're not consistent around it. But yeah, it's, it's just another way to, for community to come together and connect and share ideas. But yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's kind of hard, but it's really important to keep connected with our community. Yeah. That's the way that I started writing and being an MVP to the community. But that's the story for another day. Thank you so much for your time and hope to connect with you soon. Thank you so much for the invitation. Have a nice night and everyone around there. Thank you for sharing this moment with us.