 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and talking today with Sarah. Hello. Hi Christian, how you doing? I'm doing well. And for folks that don't know you at all, who are you? Where are you? What do you do? So yeah, I'm a techie based in Scotland. I'm now a Microsoft MVP. I think that's the first time I've used that title. I am an IT pro sys admin operations person. That's my background. I've been in IT for about 17 odd years now. I'm now working at Octopus Deploy, working on their community team as a senior solutions architect. And the other thing that I always say is I'm the founder of the Glasgow Azure user group here in Scotland as well. So that's a rough intro to my personal or professional life. How has the user group activities been going? Are you guys kind of ramping back up kind of as we're getting to the end hopefully of pandemic? Yeah, so we've been running virtually on and off during the pandemic. Our next meetup should be at the end of April. I'm still debating whether we do that in person and figuring out the logistics. All of our kind of mass mandates and limits to people meeting should be finished by then, but I believe today we've just had the mass mandate reintroduced because of spikes. So it's an ever changing situation and I guess it's trying to balance a meeting people in person because we all want to do that again. But also keeping people safe because I really definitely don't want to be the meetup organizer that organizes something and people get sick from. So yeah, it's an awkward situation. I think it was, was it February originally there was the Scottish summit that was supposed to happen. And that got moved to June. And so yeah, so hopefully that all happens. Yeah, I'm going to be over in that part of the world in June as well for a different event for commsverse. But yeah, I hope to spend a little time and get out and see so many friends that I've not seen for two and a half years. In fact, I was I was in London in December of 2019. So the European SharePoint conference which happened in Prague. And then I spent a few days over in London with family and then having been back. So tell me about like your role and so what do you what do you do for people that want to know what it like a solution architect what's that all about. So it's an interesting job title that octopus have chosen to label us with and other and other people would call us the developer relations or dev rail or advocates and because we've made the conscious decision not to use that title and because we find it a bit exclusive because we don't just talk to developers. And we talked to everybody in the IT department whether it's IT pros developers the CEO, you know the whole whole space so we didn't want to restrict ourselves by calling us developer relations. And certainly that's what the department is though. And so we use the job title senior solutions architect but really I'm an advocate for octopus. So, yeah. Have you said let's talk to the title but what so what's the actual day to day look like. I'm helping the community figure out how to use octopus solve the problems find the gaps in our documentation potentially in our product and and just engage with the community at the moment that means a lot of presentations and speaking at virtual meetups and user groups and I'm also working on a blog post series and different things on the YouTube channel so there's lots of content switching lots of trying to engage with the community trying to find people on Twitter and talk to people on Slack and discord. So yeah there's a wide variety of things that I do and so yeah it's always interesting never two days or the same. So what I'm going to have to say is that so I know that you've been in doing it for for many years and and I've been in this for my entire career since the early 90s and and it's so great to see so much more focus on the community of it not just like you're saying oh yeah we support the community and do things other but actually for organizations to recognize that active participation in the community as a company, as well as allowing making room for individuals to go in and say in different ways in the community are it's a strategy for companies and it's it's a I think it's in a very important strategy I think it's it's the way that your companies that are more plugged in the community will have a competitive advantage of those that refuse to be Yeah, I think so yeah I think people buy from people they don't necessarily buy a product sometimes so I think, like you say it's it's key for companies to get in the community and have and have some interaction there because that's ultimately what it really is like I sound like a marketer I guess I'm a marketer to a certain degree but you know people buy from people. It's a Disney program right yeah. Well it's true like if you think about the decisions you've made even when it's like you're buying a car or something you buy from a salesman who is engaging or a saleswoman who is really engaging you don't buy from the person that's not interested in and, you know, being passionate and excited about their product that they're selling ultimately so yeah it's that's really what it is. How do you divide or how do you separate kind of the the neutral MVP hat from the company official representative hat. And I don't think it's necessarily come up because octopus and is in all areas so it's not only just Microsoft that they can, they can work with. It's like a multi legged creature out there. Yeah, it's we have that multi cloud support and we also talk to various different audiences so yes there is a little overlap but there's also lots of new things that I can explore that can be completely work related, and then I can do my MVP and kind of activities or community activities, and without having a crossover and have any conflict there, hopefully. I know that some people struggle with that to understand well what's the difference I'm doing a lot of community related things but yeah when you go and you look at them like I do a ton of stuff that's community related, but is directly part of my job. You know, and so I don't add those items into my list of contributions that I submit to be renewed every year with Microsoft. I, the things that I submit are the things which are completely separate from my company, they may have paid for me to travel like that's great to do that but it's my time my weekend, you know the articles that I write that are out for for a third party site that participation. Some people have a difficult time kind of separating those two some companies have a difficult time separating those two. Yeah, I think there's things I learned on the job like for example I have been having fun with GitHub actions and making it interact with Azure and things like that. And one of the things that I found that I needed to make notes of and have written notes myself around was creating the service principle for have been able to connect with GitHub actions. So I will write a blog post about that now it's not appropriate for the work blog or documentation because we already have some documentation about that. So I have some notes to refer to next time I have to do that because I'm going to forget plus sharing that with the community will help other people potentially find that and help and engage them. So there's there's separation there where I've learned something from my job, but I can actually reuse that potentially without it being conflicting, if that makes sense. And hopefully that's the right definition of non conflicting. But that's something that I mean I had an interesting conversation with senior executive at Microsoft a few years back who I was trying to be very careful with making sure that you know information that that was being shared with me that was under NDA is an MVP. I wasn't even sharing it with my product team. I was being so careful. And this VP is just like, no Christian you're doing it wrong and we were assuming that you're taking that knowledge. And you're careful about you know the discussions but you're sharing it with your team. That's one of those advantages, but that's one of those things where, again, I was trying to figure out what is the line what what can I do. Where am I truly neutral. I always looked at it as a badge of honor where I would get done with the presentation of something and somebody go and say, I have no idea what your company does like right because I didn't talk about my company at all I was presenting on SharePoint or teams or whatever that is and and it's like so what does your company do and you know you don't have to hammer people over the head. There's a usually a natural progression. I said if you're engaging they like the content that you shared your opinion around that that that next step is they'll ask well what do you do what does your company do and there's that opportunity. Yep, yep. So what was your path to becoming the MVP. So it's, it's a kind of long and winding one. So I probably started blogging about maybe 2015 2016 around that kind of maybe even earlier than that to be honest. And at that time I was working for another big company here in Scotland, and I was actually talking to the MVP program about being an MVP because at the same time I was also involved in running the Glasgow Azure user group and starting that up. And then I ended up becoming a Microsoft employee so I had to stop the conversation around being an MVP. And I worked for Microsoft for three, three and a half years and and then recently left and reignited that conversation around MVP nomination so yeah it's been round about. And like you're saying, a lot of my job at Microsoft was community focused I was getting paid to do a lot of community activities but I also did a lot of activities myself and kept that very separate because that was something that was mine wasn't Microsoft associated I did it in my personal time because I wanted to because I enjoyed it and I got a lot from it. So yeah, I was doing a lot of activities simultaneous lesbian and Microsoft employee but as I'm sure you know when your listeners know you can't be an MVP and a Microsoft employee at the same time so it's nice to get that award finally after after kind of looking at it for a few years so yeah I've kind of taken a long and windy path to get that award so. You know, I think there are two that I know of that are MVPs that became an MVP within a month or two after leaving Microsoft, some people say well how could you do that like it has to be because these were people like, like you were doing you're still doing community part of your job. Yeah, but there's a lot of us that, regardless of the day job, we're doing a lot of other sometimes unrelated activities I my last two years at Microsoft. I was over in the advertising area and some advertising operations, and yet I was still participating in the user groups I was on the board there in Seattle, I was still involved in that that part of community. But I of course amped that up did much more as soon as I had left Microsoft, but these were these two other former Microsoft people had been doing such major things out there podcast and shows and things which were unrelated to their day jobs that it just was a natural when they left and Microsoft team figured out somebody submitted their name and like well of course these people have been doing stuff all along and so it. Yeah, it there's not a I say this again and again, as you probably know to there's not a like a black it's a black box mean there's there's not like a checklist of oh if you do these 10 things you will become an MVP. But it's it all rooted it it's all rooted in that community activity. Yeah, so very cool well so what else what are you speaking on now what are your kind of the passion projects or topics. And so I'm actually learning Azure bicep so ironic I had to leave Microsoft before I learned it or found the time to learn it. But yeah, I'm kind of dialing into Azure bicep and having a look at that and it kind of ties in obviously with where I'm going with the job as well about automation and deployments. So it's nice to have that kind of passion project and be able to use it work and again trying to keep things separate. But yeah, so Azure bicep is one of the things I'm passionate about and I'm also passionate about Windows package manager and I wrote a learn module about that just before I left Microsoft and got that published and I still think it's a great tool so I'm trying to submit some talks to conferences around package managers and things like that because I think it's an underrated tool that I'm not a lot of people use and there's definitely lots of things you can use it for and so yeah that's my kind of two passion areas right now. That's a you just that's a great strategy for people that want to kind of stand out as well as just to go and dig through the list of there's so many different products so many different things and there are there are some really cool tools which are not as is you know as visual as as you know out out in front as other major announcements things are out there so you can actually go and always tell people talk about share what you know what you're working with so if you've discovered some tools or scripts or or package some solution out there that you've just not heard that much about right about it talk about it and it could be a pathway to becoming an MVP. Yeah, my colleague on Thomas at Microsoft always talks about filling the gap fill the gaps it's there with you know find that find that gap and then fill it and so I'm always always mindful of doing that as well. Which is not to say you shouldn't write about talk about things that others have written and talked about it well because you have your perspective your your background on that as well but but yeah that's a finding those gaps and fill those gaps is always a great strategy. Well Sarah will thanks so much for taking the time for folks that want to find out more about you or find you what are the best ways to reach you and someone Twitter as techie lass and or my blog is techie lass.com. Thank you.