 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat interview and I'm here today with Melissa and thanks so much for being with me. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. So for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us the low down. Yeah, cool. So I'm Melissa Houghton and I'm a lead software engineer at a company called Azenix where tech consultancy and I'm based in Australia. So it's a tech consultancy here in Australia, but I am originally from California. So I was born and raised in California, went to university there as well. I've done a lot of my tech here here in Australia. How'd you find yourself down there? I mean, I'm jealous, although I have to admit I'm more of a New Zealand guy. I've been so many times to both, but I prefer New Zealand. But yeah, how'd you get your get find yourself down in Australia? My parents moved over to Australia when I was doing my degree in California. So I finished my degree and I was, you know, why not go live in another country type of thing? They've sent me back to California and I've stayed behind. That was kind of a bait and switch. Yeah. Well, very cool. So what is the company specialized in? I mean, services company, but what's the kind of the overview? Yeah, well, we actually specialize in Microsoft technologies. So it's all about dotnet and Azure, you know, which fits well into the MVP Microsoft space. I'm a big fan of all those technologies. And I specifically focused on dotnet myself and in general application development. So I do work with other languages as well, like Angular and, you know, learning a bit of laser at the moment and some dotnet Maui too, which is really exciting. Very cool. Yeah. And I know that you're very active on the community side. You know, what it's a, well, first kind of two things, like what you've been doing in the community. What's also been going on with the community down in Australia? Because I, my, talking with people, of course, my company has offices in Melbourne and I think Sydney as well and people all over the place. And they were like shut downs and then people are out and free and then it was locked down again. And, you know, but so what's kind of the state of the community? What's been your involvement down there? Yeah. So I help organize a few different things here. So one of them is a big tech conference called DDD, which is all like general tech for developers, designers, data, whatever you want it to be. And we do usually have around like 100 people on a big conference space. So that one hasn't been able to run the last two years now. So last year and we've cancelled it for this year as well. But we still are running little what we call DDD by night events. So they're almost like the small user group online. We're doing them online events. But I also help run the melb.net meetup. So it's another user group. And that one we've been doing pretty much all online over Zoom. But we've started trying to do them hybrid if the restrictions allow. So we've had two successful hybrid ones where we have it on Zoom, but then we also have a small space where people can come together if they're in the area. And we'll broadcast it from there. If there's in-person speakers or online speakers, we'll broadcast to the room. So trying to get a bit of a mix to help everyone. And actually having the hybrid method helps for when restrictions pop back up again. We have to go into lockdown again. We can just go straight to full on Zoom. So it's kind of being on your toes and ready to change at any time. That's a great question. There's an event that I'm going to be doing here in three weeks. It will be my first in-person event this year. We actually met a very small crowd in August last year. So it's the North American Clab Summit, which is in Branson, Missouri. I don't know if you've been to that part of the U.S. It's actually tough to get there from the west. You have to go east and fly over generally to get back to Branson. But anyway. And so this will be the second year of us doing a hybrid. And we got, so we had very low in-person numbers last year, obviously. It should be bigger now as things open up in the U.S. But we got rave reviews for the hybrid session. And the thing that we did, like the one best practice was having a person in the room that was paying attention to the questions being asked online and being the voice in the room, which was fantastic. I know any other best practices or things that you learned from your online sessions that are moving the hybrid? Yeah, I guess because the meld.net user group that I run is relatively small and, you know, we're all volunteers and stuff. So that thing that we've had the, I guess, toughest time with is figuring out the tech. So you got to make sure you have at least some sort of way to do some of the mixing. We've just used an app on the phone at one point, because yeah, we don't have all the fancy tech around. And that makes it so that you can have the Zoom call going with people talking and have the people in the room with sound as well. So it's not overlapping. There's no echoes and all that stuff. So figuring out the sound, I would say is the best thing. And definitely, yeah, having someone there reading the questions in the chat and conveying them to the people in the room and vice versa as well is definitely very key. Yeah, that's, it'll be interesting to see how things when things go back to normal, you know, how much of that still remains. You know, you have, you know, Microsoft Inspire happening this week. I don't know if you're watching any of the sessions or anybody in your org, and they keep talking about the numbers. So I think last year and Inspire, they had close to 120,000 people participate in the event, which is kind of a 10x from what typically shows up in person. Usually it's July in Las Vegas, which is a wonderful place to be in at the mid July. And so it'll be interesting to see once they get back to in person what still remains hybrid. Yeah. Yeah, definitely because one positive feedback we've had from these hybrid events is that, yeah, it makes it a lot more accessible to people. You know, we're getting people attending our events from different states that normally wouldn't be able to come, or even some international people as well. And people that just, you know, live a bit far from the city that don't necessarily want to commute in every day for these top of events. It's making it so they can, they can come. Yeah. Well, yeah, obviously there's the benefits of being there in person and the networking and all that the face to face. But sometimes, you know, and it's, it's interesting to look at the numbers and look at the, you know, the insights from that, how many people participated around which topics, and, you know, which performed better for that, you know, for the remote, you know, attendee. And did that differ from the in person? So different data analysis. So, well, so I know we come from different worlds. So your developer, I'm, you know, not on that side, I'm actually an alliance guy now. So I'm more of a relationship business dev guy now. But I've been in this space for a number of years. I always like to ask that question, like, what are you most passionate about? Like, what, what are you speaking on writing about right now? What's really caught your interest? Well, I'm really excited about what they're doing with dotnet at the moment. So they're doing this whole dotnet unification across, across all the different components of the framework or the whole Xamarin with dotnet mowing Xamarin forms and blazer blazer desktop all that kind of stuff. So they're, they're unifying it across the whole ecosystem so that you can really, you know, you share the tools, you can create one project and, you know, have it go to all these different applications, you can use the same standards and the same type of language writing across all these different platforms. So it will make it a lot easier for dotnet developers to be able to pick up building mobile apps or building web apps versus API and using one language all the way across your, your application, which is really cool. I mean, how much are you having to, you know, jump between those different languages, those different systems, those different methodologies? I mean, or are you able to kind of work in one area? Or is it just more and more common that you're working across these different technologies? Yeah, well, I guess before it was like in my work experience, I would be doing, you know, probably a dotnet backend and then the front end would be a separate app that would be an Angular or React or something like that. So you are doing a lot of switching. And the way I usually work is doing more the vertical slices, you're doing the whole front and back end. So now when, yeah, with something like blazer, you can, you know, do that vertical slice and you're not having to switch between, you know, Angular TypeScript and dotnet C sharp backend, which is really cool. Well, and I know that just historically, I mean, there's a lot larger organizations that would go and hire specifically front end developers, back end developers. I always remarked that, you know, I worked for Microsoft for a couple of years, a decade ago, but, you know, the lack of people with the title, most of my first 20 years of my career was all about, you know, DBAs. And I worked with, you know, worked in data warehousing and did massive IT projects on that back end. So it's used to having data people all around it. I go to Microsoft and didn't meet a single person with DBA in their title, you know, interacted very little with that. And it seemed to be a lot of the push was with more of the modern technologies was to people that work on both sides of that own it end to end. I mean, is that is that a trend? Or is that just my just working in the wrong or work with the wrong circles of people? Yeah, there's still it depends on where you look. There's still a lot of companies and places where yeah, they have the dedicated front end developers versus back end, but I think it's becoming more common for like the whole class cross platform full stack, you know, you do you do the whole shebang, especially for me, I'm in the consulting world. So we, you know, we go in and help the clients and you have to be flexible and have a wide range of skills to be able to, you know, really help them get the best solution. And yeah, with this dot net unification, they're saying now you're not hiring the front end developers, mobile developers or whatever it may be, you're just hiring dot net developers, which is cool. So that's the whole full stack, you know, doing it and to end type of skill set. Well, hopefully they're not also asking a lot of those folks, which I just I know that don't know the design side as well. Yeah. And so that's, you know, that's yet another layer, I guess, but yeah, I think that's typically, you know, there's the design people. Yeah, we still have a separate design team that are very specialized in the design and we work closely with them. But yeah, that's that's their their forte. I'm sure there's some developers that are good at design as well. But you know, there are those people that are out there that are good at everything and can do all of that. But is generally not for a role. Yeah, it's usually there's some separation there. Well, tell me about your so how long you've been an MVP now? So this is my first year. So not not long at all. Yes, I just got a relations again. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, I just got it in June, actually. So it's only been one month. Yeah. Well, congratulations. And why don't you tell us what was kind of your path? What was your experience to becoming an MVP? So I've been involved in the tech community for a while. And even when I first started my career, I was involved in Kododojo, which is a programming club for kids. So my one of my first companies I worked at, we had a Kododojo that we ran there. And I was the main organizer for that. So I've been involved in, you know, helping people learn for quite a while. And I got into the, I guess, conference speaking side of things through, there's a conference here in Australia. And they have some other places as well called Yao. And they have a speaker training program called Yao New Voices in Tech. And it's specifically for underrepresented people, females and non non binary. And it's to help people get into conference speaking really. So it was a whole training program, intensive, I applied and got in was successful. And that sort of kicked off my conference speaking path, I guess, because from that actually got in as why they asked me to do the lock note at DDD Sydney. So it's the Sydney version of the conference that I helped organize in Melbourne. And yeah, it was my first conference talk and I was doing the lock note, which was pretty intimidating, but it ended up really well. And then it's just spiraled from there, really. That's right. Well, you know, so I have to say, so having organized, you know, dozens of events across the Western US started these SharePoint Saturday events, you probably have heard of them or familiar with them. And a number of them. And I know for years, I, I, I co ran the SharePoint Saturday events on Microsoft campus up in Washington. We would specifically, I mean, we would constantly do outreach to try and find new speakers, people that were brand new have never done anything that were to get students and to get, you know, just we really just really pushed hard on that and struggled to get people. And after every event, inevitably, you know, people would come up and be like, Oh, I really would have liked to have done it, but I've never done it before. Like, where were you? We're trying to get people like you involved. And so those kinds of programs, I would like to see more of those to, to open that up. Honestly, if I never presented again, and but you still could help organize these events and find more variety in speakers with backgrounds and working experiences and technical backgrounds, it would be fantastic. And so I don't know any, any guidance that you can provide of kind of what worked and helping identify speakers. What was it that that pulled you in? Was it somewhere? Yeah, well, yeah, there's been a few people. There's something we call volunteering here, where you're kind of being volunteered slash told like, Hey, you should do this talk. So it's that, yeah, I've had quite a few people in the tech community who have kind of pulled me into doing these talks saying, Hey, I think you should be good at this. We'd love for you to come speak at our event, because it is that intimidation about around being the one to apply in the first place. So, you know, having somebody to reach out to you and say, Hey, we want you to come. I found, you know, really helpful because that sort of helped me get over my, the fear of applying in the first place and saying, Okay, like, I'll give it a go and see what happens. And it turned out it wasn't so bad. And just kept going, going from there. But also, yeah, just in general, having different training programs, we like to. So in, for example, the DDD conference that help organize, we do try to focus on, on new speakers. And that's one of the questions in the application form that we ask is like, have you done talks before, and we run a full like speaker training program before the conference actually starts. So after the talks are selected, we have this, you know, a few weeks of, you know, these are the kind of things that you can do to help improve helping them practice and we can assign them a mentor if they want as well. So to do automatically assign people to that program if they, if on their application, they've never presented or, or they're, they're relatively new, make them go through. Yeah. Yeah. So we, we have all of the speakers try to go to the trainings. And, and then there's a sort of extra you can ask for a mentor as well. And we might talk to them and say, like, Hey, I know you've never done it before. Would you like a mentor and put it out there? Because it's the same kind of like push and pull type of thing where people are often hesitant to say themselves, yes, I need this. Whereas if you approach them and say, Hey, I want to do this for you. They're more willing to, to accept it. Yeah, that's a great idea. And I even like the idea of, you know, volunteering people to, to have that mentor, whether they're just assigned it. And, you know, some of the suddenly somebody's like, Hey, I'm your mentor. If you don't need help, then Hey, that's great. There's light load for the, for the mentor and they might have, you know, three or four speakers to, to work with. But I know I think that is a great lesson learned of having the mentors there. And there's, you know, there have been a few events that I participated in that add kind of a similar new speaker training. And part of that too is especially if it is an event organizers, you well know, if you have no idea what the capability of this person is, there's limited online profile, and they submit and you really like that topic. You want to give them a chance. You also want to see them in action. Yeah, you want to provide that, that guidance. Yeah, that's very cool. Well, excellent. Well, Melissa, this has been, it's great getting to know you. I hope to get down to your part of the world soon. Well, I don't know, it sounds, sounds like it might be, I'm hoping, hopefully spring next year, things will be open up again. Yeah, well, my family's in California, so I'm hoping I can get over there at some point soon and see all of them again. Hopefully, one thing is an MVP, the best perk is the MVP summit. So if that's back in person next spring, you've got to make it to that event. It's really worthwhile. So awesome. Well, Melissa, for people that want to find out more about you and get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? So I'm super active on Twitter. So Twitter is a good one. So my handle is Melissa. So there's no A, so M-E-L-I-S-S underscore Houghton, H-O-U-G-H-T-O-N. And then the other way is on LinkedIn as well. So you can probably search for my name, Melissa Houghton, and you'll be able to hopefully find me on LinkedIn as well. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. And for those that are listening in on the podcast or catching this on YouTube, of course, you can find a blog post with some of the links that she just shared over on my blog at buckthedplanet.com. And thanks a lot, Melissa. And we'll catch you soon. Hopefully, see you in person next year. Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks for having me. Talk to you soon.