 Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Josh. Hello. Hello. Good afternoon. Well, for folks that don't know you, who are you? Where are you? And what do you do? OK, so I am Josh Garbrek. I am in Buffalo, New York, sunny Buffalo, New York. It's warm this time of year. I hear it is. It's actually almost 70 out right now, which is OK. Yeah, people. I was joking. You're 25, 30 degrees warmer than I am here in Utah. Yeah, so it's it's good times. It's actually it's been a nice ease into what will probably be an interesting back half of the winter. So I'll take it, you know, I'm a cloud solution architect for Codison under the Microsoft Business Group. And it's a recently formed business group that is the result of a couple of different companies coming together, primarily Tenth Magnitude, which is where I was originally seated and New Signature as well. So those two companies along with I think a couple of others that came into the mix later on. But we focus on all things Microsoft. So my particular area is at modernization and DevOps. So I do a lot of work with not only the solution aspects of things, but I get very heavily involved in the delivery aspect as well. I'm always interested to talk to folks in the DevOps space in the Microsoft ecosystem because like so I spent a few years, you know, years ago and folks that have watched this sorry, broken record on this. But so I had a startup that I sold the rational software a long time ago, pre IBM acquisition. And so I wrote my first three books were on clear case, clear quest and IBM related now IBM related technology. But in the software configuration management space, which is like the DevOps space, so it's managing code. And yeah, yeah, so it's an interesting space. And it's what's interesting is that when after they rational sold, there's a bunch of big name people at at rational that left and some of them went to Microsoft. And back in like, what was it? 2001, 2002, 2003 time frame somewhere around there. So yeah, it was I think they've all left since then, but it was just interesting to see that shift of mindshare go over to Microsoft and kind of the early days of. And that's before, of course, we were we were referred to it as, you know, SCM, not DevOps, but so it's really kind of expanded with the tool set around that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting to also see some of the trends now where folks are kind of migrating away from Microsoft and going to Google, for example. Like if you see like Jeffrey Snowver made that move, I know a few other folks have as well. And it's just good. I'm glad to see that folks are still staying in the in the overall ecosystem, the technology ecosystem, you know, brand loyalties aside. I think it's still important to be able to have good folks in those positions. So well, that's it. That is important because we've seen the same with there's a bunch of share performer, SharePoint people that are over at Google. And Google made it easy by buying a bunch of built like a whole campus right by the East Campus there in Redmond. So it just it's literally down was at 154th down towards the movie theaters and stuff before the Wells Fargo. It's like there's that campus that used to be like a we work there and a bunch of other businesses and they bought out the whole campus. But now that makes it an easy transition for folks. But you're right. In this day and age, there are very few customers that are solely down one technology stack. There are multiple technologies and players and competing solutions that are in place. And it also speaks to the need for interoperability and movement in between these different assets. And the DevOps space, I mean, there is there any clear like winners, owners of the space in DevOps, or is it really just spread out? I see so a lot of the stuff that I've come across, especially over the past several years being involved in it from not only the MVP aspect, but also just from a general work perspective. You know, obviously you've got, you know, Azure DevOps. There's GitHub is obviously huge, huge presence and even more so since the acquisition, right? I mean, that's that's definitely picked up steam and, you know, a lot of the enterprise offerings as well. Folks are starting to gravitate towards that. And I've been involved in a couple of migrations off of old on-prem systems into GitHub as well. So it's definitely interesting there. Still seeing a lot of clamor around GitLab. And people are still clinging to Jenkins for dear life. You know, it's less about what's pretty and more about what's functional for your team, right? I mean, I have my own opinions, but folks also have theirs. And, you know, if it fits your need and it's it's doing what you need it to do and it's providing value and helping to, to, you know, demonstrate efficiencies. You know, it's it's a toss up at that point. I think whatever you pick, as long as it works for you. Yeah, that's because for years, I was in more in the project management side of things. And so I would work with engineering organizations and build PMO's and, you know, like that side of things. That's how it kind of got into SCM space. But it's much the same. It's like, you know, use what works for you and with your organization. And if through acquisitions, there is a larger number of your, you know, users that are on a system and opposing system, then it might be a time to reflect and go look at what makes sense for the broader organization and and move things around. I know a lot of there is a lot of. It's it's I'm going to say it's a commoditized space. But it kind of is. There's just mainstream capabilities. I mean, are there really massive differences between the solutions that are out there and no, you know, they know, not really. Yeah, which is which is good for practitioners where it's like you can take if you've got depth of knowledge and understanding of one platform, join a new company that's using a competing platform. You're going to get 80, 90 percent of that right away and just get back up to speed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, all the mechanics and the overall UI and usability is fairly transferable between them all. When you get into the the guts, the underlying stuff, like if you're doing a conversion, a platform conversion, there are nuances that will show up that are just like, oh, why do they do that? Or this this is actually pretty cool. I like the way that this is put together versus where we're going. So it's interesting to get behind the scenes. It's there's always things. It's like every time I go up, my wife is a Mac user and go upstairs and she's like, show me on this. I'm just like, like, where are the buttons? Whether it's everything's on the reverse side. They intentionally have things swapped out. So those little nuances and things. Yeah, yeah, I am a Mac user, but a Mac user for quite some time. But I still have like if I wasn't embarrassed of how cluttered my desk was, I'd show you. But I've got like the Windows Dev Kit, the new one that just came out. I just bought that. I've got that running. I've got a Nukebox running. I've got a Raspberry Pi three node cluster. It's running Kubernetes. I have another client laptop to the one side of me. That's just a regular old, you know, Lenovo banger and my Mac, but that's my primary from from work. So I'm kind of surrounded on all sides by different processors and electromagnetic fields. So well, I always like to say that while I'm, you know, like my father in the 80s was like bought one of the first, the like the first, you know, Macintosh and, you know, so like used it for years and years and it was in graphic design in the late 80s, early 90s and so heavily used that. But and then I've been a PC user ever since. But I have to say that my primary home system for a couple of years was a Mac when Vista was released because Vista worked perfectly on the Mac. Nice. So it's like, I don't know what the some somehow, you know, Apple did the hardware right that whatever I remember every other problem other people had, I never experienced it just ran beautifully on that Mac hardware. And we used that third party tool to be able to load it and run it, but it just was fantastic and performant and just it was a great solution. But anywho, well, so, Josh, so you've been an MVP for eight, nine years now. What what was your path to becoming an MVP? So this I love telling the story, mainly because just the randomness of how it all started is something that I find funny. Long time I think it was like the beginning of 2014 or maybe the end of 2013, somewhere in that timeframe, I'd started that's when I started to really get into a lot of the CICD systems and was trying to actively promote that type of thing at my place of employment at the time. I started to really get excited about it. And it was kind of like when I first taught myself how to actually program like using VB, you know, I was a VB4 kid. That's when I came in was was around that time. And then once we started to get into things like, you know, C Sharp, I made that cut over and haven't looked back. But I started to get into the CACD platforms and TFS was obviously a big thing around that time. So I started to go through the it was the Microsoft Virtual Academy at the time, I believe was what was out there. And there were videos out there of, you know, administering TFS and doing all these things. And my goal was to go for a certification. Well, the two gentlemen who were doing the courses were, of course, Steve Borg, Anthony Borg. Right. So I'm watching these courses. I really enjoyed the content. I really enjoyed their candor back and forth and their delivery style and all that stuff. So I'm doing a little bit of side research and I see that there's this group. It's called the Visual Studio ALM Rangers. And it's a group that's partially Microsoft FTE, partially external folks. I'm like, oh, that's pretty cool. That would be really fun to be a part of. So as I'm looking through, I look at the membership roster, like who's in there. And I see that Steve is in there. So I'm like on a whim, I email him and I said, hey, first of all, I just want to say thank you so much for the content that you guys have out there for the TFS administration stuff. It's been really helpful for me. It's really gotten me excited about, you know, the CICD in general and just the whole DevOps frame of mind. And, you know, I see that you're also a member of the ALM Rangers. You know, do you have any further information about what's entailed with that? How you can, you know, express interest or whatever? And he emails me back and he said, oh, yeah, hey, thanks a bunch for the kind words on the course. And here's a Willie Peter Schaub, who is the program manager for the ALM Rangers. And through a bunch of back and forth, Steve basically chipped in for me and was just like, yeah, he'd be great for the program. And at the time, he didn't know me from just about anybody. But my enthusiasm apparently is what kind of initiated that whole thing where he's just like, yeah, you know, he should be able to join up, no problem. So that's how I started off was on that track with the ALM Rangers. And the big thing that got me into the MVP program was working on the very first iteration, the alpha of what's now the Azure Pipeline system. So if you remember back when everything was XAML, right? And they were just starting to make that cut over into task-based pipelines. Myself and I think there were maybe eight or nine other people were directly involved with like Chris Patterson and a bunch of other folks on that side of things to test out, we beat the crap out of just about every scenario that we could think of. And that's how it started. Like from there, Willie nominated me and the rest is history at least on the internet. So that's kind of where I started off too and just kept going. I love asking that question just because I mean, obviously there are similar patterns when I, like almost 200 MVPs have interviewed and asked the same question about that and there are certainly patterns within that. But one of the things that I'd love to point out is that you reached out to people like within the ecosystem. Like you get involved, participate, comment, that kind of stuff. So they're like, oh, hey, yeah, I recognize I know you from participating in things. So you can't just come out of nowhere not having participated and reach out to people that having participated, then you'll reach out, connect with people, MVPs, Microsoft people, community leaders that are out there. That's how you start the process. That's how you get the ball rolling. It's like, I was just telling somebody this week as we're getting ready to organize our what used to be our SharePoint Saturday event happening in February, which we're now collab days, Utah. And we had a couple of new faces show up to a planning call and just say that, hey, just get anybody wanna get involved. And so people are like, hey, I'd like to help out. It's like there's no shortage of things to help out with as an organizer, we're gonna find something for you to go and do and get involved. And so we wanna see. So if I've got somebody that shows up, they start helping out, they're helping out the user group, they're helping out with training materials maybe being a guest showing what they're doing with their work around certain solutions that kind of easy to get involved doing what you're just doing in your normal job. That's how you get that recognition so that if you are interested in going down that path you can have that conversation. That's right. It's absolutely right. And that's critical is just showing up, right? Yeah. Making people aware that you're interested in and you wanna help and pitching in where you can. It's less about like stacking experience as it is just being there for the experience and helping out any way you can. How do you balance? I mean, how do you, Josh, balance that tooting your own horn versus just surfacing the information out there? Because that's a real problem for so many people. I had managers for a couple of different companies that I worked for for years that were like, you're doing great stuff, nobody sees it. They're like, well, I'm just doing my job. And I'm trying to do it well. I'm not trying to go promote the fact that I'm doing my job. So how do you balance that? How do you kind of get the word out? So a lot of what I do is I attack it from two different angles. One is for a lot of the like news updates and things like that, I use buffer to help with managing the release of that type of stuff. We don't just dress alike. We also, well, where is it? There we go. Yeah. I'm also a buffer user. So. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a big fan. I've been a subscriber for a few years now and just makes it so much easier to take feeds and parse them up and say, hey, I wanna make sure that I target this time, this day, you know, if it's over the weekend, maybe I'll get a little bit more aggressive with sending out small updates. The tooting your own horn and self-promotion stuff, I tend to do that, excuse me, a little less liberally for a couple of reasons. One, I have a really hard time going, hey, Attaboy, you know, just giving myself the- Most people do though. Yeah, yeah. Most normal people, I should say, normal people have a hard time. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah, so I'll pick and choose my battles there. Like for example, when I got it, when I was accepted to do a couple of asks, the expert sessions at Dyke this year, I put that out there because to me, you know, that's a big deal for me. And I like to share that with other folks as well, who if they're in the neighborhood and they happen to go to the conference and they wanna stop by, say hi, you know, chat about something, that makes that in-person connection a little bit more meaningful. Same with books and I'm sure, you know, you're in the same boat where you have things that are getting ready for publication, whether it's books or whether it's, you know, online courses or anything like that, you wanna get the word out for, you know, obviously sales purposes, but also to kind of let folks know, hey, you know, I've spent a considerable amount of time on this particular subject, go check it out. Maybe, you know, hopefully find some use of it. Yeah, agreed. It's a, I mean, look, there's a lot of strategies. I have provided a lot of advice on, there's things that I do that have just become habits now, where I, like one of the things that, if you visit my blog, there's actually monthly updates. And it looks like a, hey, he's tuning his own horn kind of thing. It's like, no, it was, I started doing it internally, just to capture, to make sure that I didn't lose, like what did I work on? Where did I speak? Where are my slides? Where are the recordings? You know, all of those things in one place. Then it became a newsletter that I would push out internally to say, hey, here's everything that I've been doing. And I was the chief evangelist for an ISV. And so like, here's everything that's going on. Then I started tagging everything in CRM, anything that was relevant. So that if, which I think is a great internal strategy. So if somebody else in your company and on the sale side is working with a customer, they goes like, what content do we have around this? Oh, hey, our chief evangelist or our head of engineering or whoever it is, it's the MVP, you know, wrote this blog post on that topic. So that there, it helps surface that information. And then over the years, probably six, seven years ago, I turned it into these monthly, just a blog post outlining everything. And so I'll often forget, it's almost like a time capsule. I'll go back and what was I talking about two years ago? I see the outline of exactly what I was talking about. That's awesome. Yeah. It's just an extension of the brain, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like that, that's an aspirational place for me. I'm much less, I won't say much less organized, but I won't say I haven't compartmentalized to that level as of yet. So, but that's an absolutely great technique. It's a process to get there. It doesn't happen just overnight, but like anything, now it's just, it's a habit. I just think that way and, you know, what one note has all the notes around that and collect it all up and then it's just in, you know, to organize it though. Nice. Very cool. Well, what else, anything else that's going on in the community and what's your involvement there? So I've done a few talks virtually for the Microsoft reactor out in New York. So I did a couple of talks on cost management and on dev containers. I want to say a couple of months ago and then I also did one for an Azure group out of Toronto that was covering introduction to service mesh. So I went, you know, kind of ran through the basics of what it is, why you might want it, why you might not need it, what some of the major players are and key benefits and stuff like that. The sessions that ignite were actually around cloud for healthcare and cloud for retail. So it was more of like an onsite, I don't know if you were there in person as well. No, it wasn't. It was in another event that had already been scheduled so that got overlap, which is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, right. Thanks, Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was an interesting experience. Basically the way that they had the expo lead out, there were different colored zones and each zone had this huge U-shaped desk. So I kind of felt like I was working at a Best Buy in that respect. You know, it's just like I chill in back there and people come up and ask me questions and stuff, but it was fun. It's a good way to kind of get more randomized feedback from folks, right? As opposed to, you know, typically when you're doing a talk or anything like, even if you're doing like a moderated Q&A or table topic, there's still a lot of structure to it. Whereas, you know, these, you could get any kind of question from things that are, you know, very, very technically deep to just absolutely off the wall stuff. Like why would you ask me that question? I love the AMAs for that purpose too. And, you know, if I were more organized, I would kind of start, I would catalog all the questions, whether they're answered or not. And again, look for the kind of the patterns and say where, and that would, for me, as a content creator, if I keep seeing questions around there, that means that, hey, they're not getting the answers out of the, you know, the documentation. Cause one of the problems is for folks that, you know, are not content creators around the tech spaces, you know, Microsoft does, is they've really improved their content creation, but so much of it is like, here's how I walk through the steps of to get through, navigate through the platform to do something, but then they missed all of the nuances of your industry of your business. They don't have necessarily the case studies, the scenarios, the real world, you know, examples of that thing, which is really what, you know, people need to, it's like doing a demo against your own data versus the generic data that's out there. I know we all appreciate the Contoso examples that are out there, but, you know, when you have something that is shared against your industry and with the nuances, the language of the real world and not just the product team trying to translate and walk you through the steps, it makes a big difference. That's why community content is so invaluable. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you know, two things that come to mind immediately are both in kind of that regulated industry area, you know, healthcare and finance, right? So a lot of these examples are really good at getting the core concepts down, but then, you know, a lot of folks that I talked to were like, well, how do I make this PCI compliant? Or how am I, you know, using something that's gonna be able to encrypt everything and to end at rest in motion and in process, right? I mean, yeah, now there are things for that, but that was always a huge nut to crack is to figure out how to do stuff like that. So having even those nuanced references into how you could potentially leverage other products to do things like that with that industry flare is something that's really important. Right, well, and we were, as we were talking about earlier, the competitive solutions that are out there. So there's a lot of questions about how do I move from this other here or how do I get the two to work together to interoperate? How do I, you know, all those kinds of questions? Again, that's why I love the AMAs. It's always great when there's a panel of you versus just you there. So there's a lot of, I don't know answers, but great thing about MVP is that we might not know the answer, but we probably know somebody who does know the answer. Exactly. But I prefer having the panel. So a group of us answering those questions, but... Well, Josh, well, really appreciate your time today for folks that want to follow you or reach out and connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I would say Twitter and LinkedIn. So my Twitter handle is at JayGarverik and my LinkedIn profile is out there in the wild. It's just linkedin.com in Josh-Garverik. Easy. And we'll have the links, of course, in the blog post out on buckleyplanet.com and for those that are listening to the podcast and also out on YouTube. So, Josh, really appreciate your time today. Yeah, thanks. Been a pleasure. Appreciate it. Enjoy the coming winter. I don't know what was the Game of Thrones. It was like the winter is coming. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's funny because my chair is actually a Game of Thrones custom from Secret Lab that has winters coming on the side of it. So it's nice. It's interesting you bring that up. Yeah. Well, you're in Buffalo. It's coming. It's going to hit hard. So. Yes. Stay safe. Yeah. Indeed.