 Everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Keith. Keith, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks, Christian. How are you? I'm doing well. It's doing, it's just the start of a new week, ready to get going. So much to do, so much to do. But besides that, so Keith, for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Yeah, sure thing. So as you say, my name's Keith Aderton. I'm a business applications MVP. I've been an architect and developer for about 23 years now, mostly with Power Platform recently, as well as Azure and .NET. I'm also a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. I co-organize a user group here in Scotland, the Scottish Power Platform user group. And I get up to a few other things like speaking and blogging and all kinds of things as well. But I'm based here just outside Edinburgh in Scotland. Ah, yes. Well, that's, so I've talked about with a few other folks that have interviewed. So I'm, you know, more than 50% of my, on both sides of my family are Scottish. And so there's some Irish in there where the last name comes from. But yeah, I've got like 15 generations outside of Glasgow, like never moved. The people just stayed there. The Richardson people just did not leave. They were, you know, right there, but so I've been up in that area. I love that, that part of the country. So I lived in Seattle for 12 years. So I like the rain. I like the wind. You'll be welcome here. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, it's in my roots. It's in my DNA to like that kind of weather and things. So what's exciting? Well, I always like to ask, like, what was your origin stories at MVP? So what was your path to becoming an MVP? Yeah, you know, that's an interesting one because I think for many years in my career, I've been a .NET developer. I used a few other text acts as well. But it was really only in the last couple of years or so that I'd started speaking. I'd seen a few presentations over over the years. I've been to a few really good tech meetups and user groups. And there was one in particular, someone called Pete Gallagher did a really good presentation with a robotic arm and he created a simple blazer app and you signal on to control this robotic arm. And it was a bit more tangible, a bit more hands on. And I thought, oh, robotics, that's cool. That's really interesting. So it inspired me to try and brave it and give my first speaking gig. So I pitched a few talks, got one accepted. And that was the start of it, really. And since then, all the talks I've been doing since the beginning was to share information with others. So one of the things I talked about was I was new to Microsoft certifications. And then I realized that some of the virtual training days, you get free exam vouchers. I thought, I wish I'd known that before I paid for my first one. So the first talk I did was just to share that knowledge and save people sort of paying if they have to and sharing different learning resources and things. And it just really built from there. And I think it was maybe six months to 12 months in doing speaking and other things as well that I realized there was this award called the MVP. I wasn't aware of it before. And yeah, I just learned more about it. It wasn't something that I deliberately focused on, I would say. But it just sort of, the more community work I did, it just kind of naturally came away, which was a lovely surprise, I have to say. That's very cool. And I'm interested to know how you got involved with the LinkedIn learning side as well. Yeah, you know, it's one of your previous guests there, Greg Assotti, who's an Azure MVP, also based in Scotland. Not too far from me, actually. And when I started trying to learn about newer technology like Azure and a few cloud compute and a few other things, it was actually Greg's blog where we were sharing these different learning materials and things. And it was actually through learning about that on there and getting connected with Gregor. And then I think after a period of time, I noticed Gregor was a LinkedIn learning instructor. I'm naturally quite curious slash nosy. So I was like, oh, Gregor, that's cool. How did you go about that? And what's the experience like? How did you enjoy it? And he had really positive things to say about it. So we talked more and more. He connected me with his manager that he deals with at LinkedIn. We just had like a discovery chat to get to know each other and then took it from there. So yeah, it's been a really good experience so far. You know, there's something to be said about, you know, like modeling behavior, like identifying people that is like, you know, I'm doing a lot of the same things. Like how come they've got this setup? Like what can I do? Go and ask those questions. I mean, as MVPs, I'm just true with LinkedIn learning, but any aspect of the Microsoft ecosystem, you know, you see somebody who's doing something like, even if you're not yet qualified or ready to jump into that role, go ask them about it. Like how do I get started? What are the things that I need to be doing? And then the hard part, do those things. Yeah, you know, absolutely, I completely agree. And you know, most people are lovely. And as you say, if you just go out there and ask them bump into someone at a conference, say, what do you do? You know, hey, I'm Keith, how's it going? You know, most people are going to be nice and responsive and you never know who you'll bump into as well. But I can highly recommend that to just as you say, reach out on Twitter, LinkedIn, however you can connect with people online. And you'll find most people are just willing to share the information and help others out. Yeah, well, what I find too with having run user groups for more than two decades now is that you have a lot of people that were like, hey, I'm really interested, I'm excited by this. I want to get involved. And then you never see them again. And one of the things that I tell people is that you need to show up, you need to be there, you need to be accountable for the things that you sign up for and then just be consistent in showing up. And that's something where, I mean, with user groups, like I helped start the SharePoint Saturdays a lot of people are familiar with. So I was attending a lot of these on the East Coast. And like, why aren't there any of these on the West Coast? And so I helped start up some of the first ones on the West Coast. And I was starting them in other cities that I knew people, I had networks, I had lived in some areas. Sacramento is a great example of that. I had no intention of running it. It was then finding people to take it on and own it and drive it. And as soon as I found those people, I just was able to let go and they just took off with that. So for people that want to know how to become an MVP, I mean, one of the first things I say is like, go participate and be an active member of your community. And after you've been doing that for six to 12 months, if you're showing up and helping out and haven't been added to the board or some subcommittee, helping organize things, then you're not helping enough or asked specifically to be added to those things. Because as a user group, a board member, if somebody came to me and said, hey, I really want to get involved and do something, we have plenty, we can assign things to give them to do. And we know something about a person very quickly if they do it or disappear. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So I would say, you know, being accountable, as you say, communicating well as well. It might be you're doing cool things, but unless you feed that back and keep people updated as well, that they may be unaware of that, or sometimes I've seen duplication of effort to people in the same team do things because they've not coordinated something as well. And I think going back to the user groups that you mentioned there, Christian, some of the things I'm doing like the user groups, blogging, and even the LinkedIn learning, which, you know, let's be fair, that's a paid gig. So it's not quite an MVP activity per se, but I'm getting out there doing lots of different things to see what works well for me. So me, I like helping people first and foremost. I'm fairly creative, you know, whether it be doodling or music or whatever the case may be. So sometimes I find a natural fit with some things more than others. You know, I like to present something that's a bit more creative, a bit more quirky and fun. And with the user group that I'm co-organizing with at the moment, with two other great people, you know, I'm the one who's doing some of the graphics and logo work and kind of, you know, the kind of quirky things we'll use as the marketing or to get the word out there. So it's about finding that natural fit for you and it'll likely be that, you know, I'll do a few things and discard a few, but stick with my favorites. That's a good fit for me. Well, that's always what it is. Another thing I say all the time is about developing healthy habits. I mean, some people say, I'm deathly afraid of presenting in public. Like I could never go and do that. That's fine. You don't have to. There are MVPs who never present. They prefer to be background players. They prefer to, well, one person in, I think of it, I was, he's one of my go-to SharePoint experts, hates presenting and is just very active in the forums, answering questions there. So doesn't create, blogs sometimes rarely, never creates a video asset, never presents in public, but is heavy duty invested in the forums, like daily is in there. So there are different ways to contribute. So I'm interested too. So you're a business applications MVP. Like what is your focus? Like what are you passionate about? What are you writing about, speaking about, and, you know, what topics, what technologies kind of drive you and motivate you? Yeah, that's a really good question because for me, it's been a mix. I think when I first started doing the speaking, it was about the certifications, and I was having the perspective of someone new to that. But I thought that was kind of a valid perspective as well, to say, well, here's how I got started. I learned a couple of things the hard way. I want to share them so you don't have to, if you're starting out. It's always great to share your journey and don't worry about that somebody else has written about that and done that because you have your perspective, you have your background. Somebody might connect with you that might connect with somebody else's, that you're not connected with somebody else's information. So it's, you definitely need to go through that. So, all right. Complete, no, I completely agree. And actually somebody did contact me recently saying, you know, I want to do some YouTube videos, some YouTube shorts, just little quick tips with Power Apps, which is really where my main focus is at the moment. They're saying, but I think 90% of people will know this anyway, but I'm like, put your spin on it. You know, there's also people learning, you know, it's from the ground up. This would be useful. They haven't seen it yet. They may not have seen something by, you know, quote unquote, a bigger name that has been published two years ago. So go ahead and put your thing out there or put your spin, you know, make it unique to you, the way you would present it. And you know, I'm glad that some people have actually gone ahead and done that rather than say, well, I've done a quick Google, I've been on YouTube, I've seen that done before, I won't do it. You can still do your own take on that. And as you say, everyone's got a valid perspective and something to offer as well. It could be the way you word it or the way you demonstrate it. It's like, ah, that's clicked for me now. I see what they've done there. And I've certainly had that experience myself as well. So yeah, the main thing for me at the moment, business applications, but mostly the power platform is my focus. The biggest part of that for me is Power Apps being a developer for so many years. And that's really, there's a lot of skills as some people say pro-coder or professional-coder, but because I've done that for over 20 years, that's a lot of skills and design patterns I'm able to bring to Power Apps. But then there's so many other people in the community who bring lots of really important other perspectives that I don't and they have business domain knowledge or other knowledge or automation knowledge. And we can also fuse it together and work together and create things that I just couldn't buy myself. Great UX and UI experiences, I just can't hold a candle to. And it's great because I'm always learning to. So that's great. No, and this is another important thing too is that identifying other good content and then commenting on that or referencing that in your own content. There's some people like will reach out to me and is like, hey, I really liked what you said here, can I quote you? And I'm like, hey, if you're properly citing me, you don't need to come ask my permission to quote in a not for profit blog posts around that. I don't know what the rules are but they're different in other countries. But generally you don't need to do that. Like I will go in, I do now AMA videos to the group of friends and we have like little blog posts. Again, these are all free, we're not making money anywhere off of that. And at the bottom of it, we have references of all the materials, the other websites, the videos that other people have done that help answer those questions and we provide those links. And so we have those track backs to other people's content. So that's another great way that you can, certainly raise visibility is by citing the work of others that have come before you. And it's, again, add your spin, add your flavor to that, your perspectives. But you definitely want to mention others, especially other MVPs. MVPs love that. Yeah, they do. They do and that's a great way of doing it as you say, having those references, citations and sometimes it might lead you to a blog where the blog as a whole has so many other posts that are really, really valuable. But if you just neglect to mention the reference or you forget to whatever the case is, other people may be missing out on all that valuable information. So yeah, that's a really great way. And even calling people out, I'll try and do that when I do a post now. And again of, hey, there's someone in the Power Platform community called Christine Kolodzeski who does really good UI UX work. And she has awesome social marketing for her stuff as well. She does. It's one of the best that's out there. It's really slick. It's really impressive work and she shares so much and so many others do too. You know, she has things on GitHub. She runs different programs. She's got one at the moment, which is just kind of, she's setting different challenges with CSS and other things. And she's got a gallery on the website showcasing all this work with links to their profiles. I think that's great. I love stuff like that. And she's funny. So I always appreciate that too. Absolutely. There's, you know, again, there's so many, you know, people doing great things that are out there. One of the things is that you can't look at all of the great work others do and think, oh, well, I just can't do it. The imposter syndrome runs high within the MVP community. Like don't worry about that. Share what you do. Share, especially like you mentioned earlier about sharing kind of your beginning steps, your journey. That's some of my first advice for people to say, well, I'm not yet an expert in the technology. So, you know, no one can be an expert on everything. The people that you think are experts will think that they're woefully underprepared to speak on a number of different topics. We're constantly learning and exploring and sharing our journey. We were not always correct on the things that we share. I mean, again, it's based on our experience. So I love it when people, again, doing the AMAs, the experiences all the time, people that would respond and say, it's like, well, I found this other way. You didn't mention this. I'm like, that's a great point. We didn't think of that in our discussion. It's not that we, you know, if we had had that person there, we would have had that also covered. But yeah, so be constructive in your feedback is what I would hope for most people commenting. I try to do the same thing. It's not just to go in, hey, you've got it wrong or you missed this piece. It's more of a, hey, that's great what you've added. Here's something else that adds on to that. That's the right way to approach that. I'd agree as well. There's a really good way of giving constructive feedback, as you say. There's many other ways of giving feedback or criticism as well. And I actually had a good one a few months ago where I wasn't an MVP at the time. Not that it matters, but someone else was and they give some criticism of a blog post I'd done. But they did it really well. You know, it was like, oh, that's like the blog post, but did you know there's another way of doing this? And I didn't at the time and it was actually really valuable because then I'd learnt something. So I'd shared my perspective, they'd shared something and I was able to actually modify the post and include some of that feedback so then everyone can get the benefit of that advice. So it's all just one continuous learning journey for me. So I welcome it, it's great. That's a great point. And I love doing that too, do the same thing where somebody will come in and say, he didn't think of this, look, comment within it. I leave the comment and I'll put in there and say, hey, update on this, got his feedback from John Smith about this, he's spot on, here's what this is, point to this, this other blog post, whatever it is. So that people again can see the journey, see the process that you went through like kind of leading there. I think that's fantastic. It's important to do that. You hear this all the time, you know, show your work, going back to elementary school, show your work. You may know the answer, yeah, but it's good to show your work so people can help them along the process. Because the problem is, especially when you're talking about the business applications, problem for a lot of people, I would still argue there's not enough beginner's content out there for Power Apps and Power Automate because it's such a, you go in there and I've built up ticking classes and knowing, you know, like building the SharePoint components of something easy, I can do that with my eyes closed, but when it gets into some of the syntax and the logic around the solution and going in between is like, that's not my world, not a code or not a programmer. And so having more of that kind of content. So you have to be careful not to jump past those, you know, elementary to immediate, you know, the kind of the mid-level steps to the advanced, you have to walk people through that. And I think that's again, there's a, I still say there's a huge opportunity for people that wanna become an MVP to do nothing but introductory 100, 200 level content. I mean, I think the greatest need is in that area. The danger for an MVP, I'm sure you've seen the same thing is that we get bored with the old stuff that we've been playing with, we wanna play with the newest technology, talk about the latest greatest and it gets up into that 300, sometimes 400 level topics and we lose all of that content. It's great for the nerds, for the MVPs, for the experts, but we lose the majority of the audience. And so we walk through. Absolutely, yeah. I see your point there is, you know, give me the shiny new tools. You know, I've done this for a few years. I've, you know, maybe mastered it to a level. What's the next step for me? What's the next thing to move on to? But yeah, as you say, you know, there's maybe, you know, quite likely a big opportunity there for getting people started and, you know, a good case in point with the Power Platform is, you know, one of the main business drives for it is that there are so many developers or let's say makers required going forward because so many apps or things going digital are required. So, you know, if we've got this big intake of people or career switches moving to using things like the Power Platform and or Dynamics, then yeah, there's certainly gonna be the demand for that kind of content. So absolutely, yeah, watch this space. Yeah, always lots to do. Well, Keith, really appreciate your time today. I always like to ask, so for folks that wanna follow you, get in touch with you, where are you most active in the social realm? How can people find you? Yeah, sure thing. If anyone wants to connect with me, LinkedIn and Twitter, I'm probably the active two channels that I use the most. Always happy to help people. If anyone wants to get started with Power Platform, anybody wants advice, I do help on the Power Platform Community forums as well where I can. But yeah, I'd say LinkedIn and Twitter are the top two for me. Excellent. Well, Keith, really appreciate your time today. Great meet you. My pleasure. Thanks, Christian. Thanks so much.