 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Annie. Hello. Hi. For folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Yeah. I'm Annie. I am from Finland originally, living in Zurich, so it's in the nowadays. I am an Azure MVP as well as a CNCF Ambassador. What those two essentially mean that I love sharing my knowledge on both communities in Cloud and Cloud-native and container topics in general, both the conferences as well as online activities and whatnot. I've been a track chair at CubeCon for a few times already. I have hosted a weekly live stream for CNCF which is called Cloud Native Live since 2021. I've organized meetups since 2017 for CNCF and Kubernetes. I was a co-organizer for Finland. What else? I always keep forgetting half of the things that I've done, but a lot of conferences to be honest, I did 30 last year or actually- It's always a question because in fact, it's a question I ask a lot of interviewees is what's happening with the local community or things still? Does it feel like it's ramping back up or is it back ramp? Does everything back to normal post-pandemic? Well, I think for Europe in general, it's been quite good for a quite a long time now, so I think it's ramped up for sure because all the restrictions and all of these gathering with these restrictions were lifted a while ago already, so I think it's quite normal. Now, at the same time, I think communities always change and move and whatever. They never stay put, which is the good part about community as well. I think there has been a lot of communities that have gone through a lot of changes after the pandemic but that might also be due to time passing and whatnot. I also help out organizing the Swiss meetups for CNCF and communities nowadays because my employer vision where I'm the CMO, we organize and we've organized them from the beginning, so I was very happy to jump into a Swiss company as well who's been involved in the community space for such a long time. Well, I think that's where a lot of the user groups I think are struggling and part of it is, it's good and bad. It's like more of them are hybrid or virtual and so there's more of them and they're getting a lot of people that are dialing in, but an incredibly powerful part of community is the in-person aspect of it. I think that's why, I mean, I'm glad to see events are ramping up. It's a little bit slower, but it's also happening in the US and numbers are looking really good for some of these events. But it's for user groups, there's fewer people showing up in person, more people want to dial in. I think it's the same in Europe as well, because I think people got used to the easiness and you just open your laptop, you listen in, so those changes are happening here as well. But there was a bit of craze when all the restrictions got lifted, like all events were so full, so buzzing, so fun, because everyone was just so joyous to be getting desperate joyous, the same. Just same emotion. Yeah. Well, and I guess that's the hard part, is that what we see for our user group here locally is that we know more than half of the people are from out of the state, many from out of the country, and so how do you build the local community, and is that even as important as it was, the local community versus anybody that's interested within that topic? But yeah, so that's, I know that's just a struggle a lot of groups have seen, but you're right. I think events are getting back and back up to speed and more people reaching out, and there are more way to describe it, smaller events that are popping up as well. So it's good to see that. So you talked a little bit about the topic, so what are your primary contribution types? Are you more of a writer, speaker, video content, community person? Yeah, so far very much heavily on the speaking because it kind of became a whirlwind, essentially I started speaking, well, I was organizing the meetups for a long time and all of these kinds of things and doing local things, but then when I started speaking at international conferences, I was maybe a bit not greedy, but like, you know, when you're having fun and it's fun and you know what not, so I started doing a lot of them, but now I'm scaling down a bit because doing, I did through two years of 30 conferences per year, which is a lot, which is kind of, yeah. Did that for years, right? No, it's, no, people need to understand too that even if your company is covering your, paying for your flights and the hotel and all that, which is fantastic when you have that support, you're giving up weekends, it's your time, it's away from family, it's away from everything else, I mean, it's a lot, I did that, I did that two to three events a month for years. It takes a lot to do that. Exactly, so now I'm switching a bit to other things and whatnot, but that's always kind of in a flux, but a lot of speaking as well as a lot of like program committee work for KubeCon and I've done mentorship as well, like helping young mentorship programs and whatnot, and then also the meetups, I basically is a big part as well of my contribution. Now, did you come over to the, did you do the MVP summit this last year, the kind of the smaller version? So this one, something happened, I don't know who was the one who made up with this, but it was at the same time as KubeCon Euro. Yeah, I've heard that from a couple people. I know, I know. And as a CNCF ambassador, and I was doing something, I think I was speaking as well or managing, I don't know, I always do something. So I was like, okay, I'm already settled in, I'm booked and I have to go there. And it would have actually been my first in-person MVP summit, which is why I was very sad to have to make that choice, but luckily this year MVP summit in the coming spring one is one week before KubeCon Europe. So this time I'll make it for the first time for the in-person one. I know there's a few people that were, that had made extended plans over in Europe. So to go early for that and do some community activities and then participate in the conference. And now they've cut all the community stuff so they could be over in the US, do the summit and over. And I say this again and again and again to people at the MVPs or people that are aware. It's like it is the number one perk of being an MVP. There's, you get so much value out of, again, meeting all of your peers, meeting the Microsoft engineering product teams, the marketing teams. I mean, I'd say for any MVP that's on the fence of, hey, there's other events or spending the money to go over to the US, especially I realize how expensive it is to travel. It's still such a high value event and I would highly recommend that if you can that you should participate. Yeah, I've been hearing exactly the same things so my expectations are very high and I only expect them to be met but I'm very much looking forward to it, yeah. Well, I would say that it's not so much like the content and there's tons of behind the, like these are all NDA presentations folks so sorry, we can't share what we learn. We hear about the roadmap, we provide feedback, I mean, some of them are very hands-on. What you don't get even watching it virtually, what you miss out are the side conversations, like hearing the questions your peers are asking and then out in the hallway, the grilling of the speakers that had to move out of the room to let the next speaker in and out in the hallway, the conversations around that. So it very much is a place where as an MVP we can take our list of questions from us personally from the community, from our companies and really get answers or attempt to get answers but develop relationships with the right contacts inside of Microsoft. Anyway, I'm soapboxing on, for folks that are just watching this that are not on MVPs they're like, yeah, what value is this to me? No, no value is you. Except if you know an MVP and you have a question you can actually provide your question those MVPs so you might be able to get some answers out of that. Yeah, and even if you don't know an MVP you can always reach out and send a message in LinkedIn, any social medias or whatever. I think people would be happy to help or I can, for example, just pass on the question as well if anyone has anything. That's a great way to do it. Well, I always say don't be shy to the MVPs, get to know your local MVPs. And so you've been an MVP now for three years now? Two or three. Yeah, yeah, I'm around that. So what was your journey to becoming an MVP? How'd you hear about it? Was it something you kind of aspired to do or what was that story? I actually knew a lot of MVPs at the time as well. So I, so back in the day, so I've done like a 10 year career in tech and tech marketing and other products and whatnot. And within that time I worked at Microsoft for example in DX before. So it was involved with a lot of the startups and developer engagements and everything. So even back then I was kind of diving deep into the tech communities from Microsoft, which obviously included the MVPs and all of these. So I already knew a lot of folks from that time. And then, well, I started organizing the meetups, the per-CNCF and communities and so forth, which eventually just led me to kind of doing my own contributions as well and everything. So it was, I think, for me, it was felt like a very natural path because I knew so many MVPs because they're lovely and very chatty folk. So then it just became kind of like a natural step too. And so I'm sure now you've had plenty of people that come forward. You talked about already providing mentoring. Do you provide mentoring around the MVP program? Do people come and say, hey, how do I go down that path and what is your advice to those folks? Well, a lot of people do ask me that in events. The mentorships that I've done have been for example, part of those I want to like, it's tech mentorship for starting founders, for example, in the Nordics. This is what I'm part of the, Microsoft wrote about it to the MVP plug as well, like about four different mentors around the globe. For example, I also coach early stage startups as well, part of an accelerator programs for a few years now because I used to be a professional, like a startup coach as well back in the day. But as far as like MVPs or people who want to do tech speaking because people might ask that from CNCF ambassador point of view as well and so forth. I just usually tell people, do whatever you love, like do whatever makes you happy as far as like teaching or somehow contributing to the tech communities around you. Because there's so many different ways to become an MVP or to be honest, to become someone who contributes to the tech communities, which is the most important part in my opinion is the contributions. It's the kind of helping other people. I know people who have become MVP, for example, because they do a lot of stack overflow, like answering. They just answered every single question for a certain topic. I think that's amazing. I know people from both of the programs who've been in both who have been open source maintainers and because they are a part of a project, they help people get started within their open source project, which is also a form of educating and kind of talking and so forth. Or people just do a lot of conferences, write books or whatever it is. So there's so many different ways to get to MVP or one of these tech community memberships. And I think the key is just figuring out what do you like to do? If you like writing blog posts, write blog posts. If you like anything videos, do that because whatever you like doing is the thing that you're kind of probably like to do for a long time and because it requires a bit more effort than just doing one thing once. So that's why number one thing. So find what you like and just rinse and repeat this issue. I've had conversation with a couple of folks that just said, ah, I'm not doing enough. I'm not blogging enough. I was like, well, no, you're out there creating video after video after video. It's like you don't have to ever blog. You're doing a lot of other stuff but that's what it really kind of comes down to is it's a lot for a lot of people that are, number one is you're given back to the community. That's what it's about. So if you don't enjoy sharing what you're working on and sharing the knowledge that you have, then it's not for you. That's the core of this. But if you're doing that, there's no, to your exact point, there's no single way. There's not a checklist of things to become an MVP. So it doesn't have to be a broad range of all of those things. You can be like, all I ever do is get into tech community or Stack Overflow and answer questions. That's it. There are people that get their MVP that way. What the volume needs to be, the area, that's the black box part of it. Like we don't know. It's Microsoft that makes the decisions but yeah, there's a place for everybody to get involved. And then of course, there are the people that do all those things and never get MVP. It's like, well, you're getting the value. You're making connections. You're helping people. It's nice to have the award. It doesn't always happen. So again, it's not a checklist just because you're in there doing it on a regular basis like doesn't mean guarantee that you're gonna get that. But again, there's a lot of value. There's a lot of benefits. And hopefully the people that are in there doing it for the right reason, helping people, that's enough. That's plenty. Yeah, exactly. I agree because at the end of the day while matters is that we're helping and sharing our knowledge because that's just like a very, I think very basic human nice thing to do as well. And that's the thing that matters is the helping other people and helping the people around you and sharing knowledge. And as long as you're doing that you should be kind of doing good as well in that way. Well, Annie, I really appreciate your time today. And maybe we'll see each other at the event. I'll definitely be there of course. We never know how they organize things whether we'll be in different areas. Usually the Azure topics are over in one building and I'm over in the collaboration, the SharePoint teams, areas and another building. And so we'll see how the layout is for this year. But hopefully we'll run into each other at some point. Yeah, there's gonna be a lunch or something where we can catch up or something. Likely something. Maybe there'll be a big jumbo party where they kind of bring everybody together again like the old days. So we'll have to see what's in the budget, what they're doing. But really appreciate your time. And for folks that want to connect with you, reach out and find you. Where are you most social? Where can people find you? I think LinkedIn to be honest is the most certain place but I am on, you know, the old Twitter which is the X nowadays or I am on Blue Sky as well and whatever. So, you know. So there's like a dozen of us on Blue Sky now, awesome. Yeah, exactly. But I think LinkedIn is the one that I use the most for sure, yeah. For sure. Well, we'll have the links to all of her contacts. You'll be able to find it out, of course on Buck the Planet blog, out on YouTube and out on the podcast when it all goes live. So thanks so much and hope to see you here in March. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Wow.