 this is Christian with another MVP BuzzChat interview. I'm here today with Mike. Hey, how's it going? Fine, how are you? I'm doing well. And for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us that overview? Yeah, I will give a short overview. Mike van Gaag, I live in the Netherlands in a place called Schiedam. It's near Rotterdam. So most people know Rotterdam as well. Yeah, what I do, I'm basically a CTO of a company in the Netherlands called the 350. Basically, what we do is we do consultancy around Microsoft. We also do cloud licensing and also many services for our customers. And next to that, in my personal life, I'm a soccer trainer for one of my sons. And I like to do community stuff. So that's basically how I ended up here. Well, first I'll be going to point out, this is you just you refer to it as soccer. Yeah. So it's just for my benefit or? No, I'm just I would also refer to football. But yeah, it's the Dutch. I think the Dutch soccer. So it's just a ball on the foot, not the ball in the hands. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But I was just shocked to hear it come out of your mouth. So I always joke. I know it's becoming bigger in the US here, but I always refer. I used to love to do this around fans who are real football European football fans. And I would say, well, in the States, I mean, soccer is a sport for girls and pale young boys. And then people would get very angry, especially if they were drinking. But no, it's actually it's it's it's starting to gain a lot of speed, a lot of activity. We actually have a national team here where I live in Utah and who have done fairly well. I don't know, I don't follow them. I'm a basketball guy, so. But hey, so I know you're on the community stuff. You're also involved with like the like the global Azure events and other activities. Yeah, I try to do as much speaking events as I can. So I also have three kids at home. So I have to break my time on what to see what I can do and basically in all those things. I try to do as much as possible and mainly around the main Azure topics, like Bicep, the past platform as a service offerings, basically my skills later and also part in Azure DevOps as well. Yeah, and I noticed that Microsoft just made a change. I don't know how much has been, you know, is known outside of the MVP circles, but there's a new focus around DevOps. And you know, is it a split within Azure? So DevOps and GitHub, I believe. Yeah, I'm not fairly known about that change already, but yeah, there is already years of coming and discussions going on around GitHub, DevOps, what should I use? And basically, there are mainly use both. And for example, I work for a large enterprise customer at the moment and they are a heavily user of Azure DevOps. I don't see them switching very soon, for example, GitHub enterprises, meaning that they will, yeah, Microsoft will keep supporting Azure DevOps, I think, for a lot of time. But yeah, as far as I know for main new projects, if you need to make a choice between Azure DevOps and GitHub, they try to push you to GitHub, meaning that if you have the functionalities available in GitHub, of course, there's still some differences between two products, you have and you can choose for GitHub or otherwise to Azure DevOps. Well, it's interesting because I know there's the whole, like the software configuration side of things, but then there's the project management side of things. And there's been a lot of discussion, a lot of interest in seeing more integration between project online, which is really kind of, I don't know, flat lined in my opinion, it's not taken off. And you've had a lot of the effort that's happened in the desktop project management with Planner and to do on that world. And there's a push and there's actually a roadmap between Azure DevOps plan or project and project online and Planner to do deeper integration. I don't know what the roadmap where that, what's being extended, what's being thought about from a GitHub standpoint. Me neither as well. You see GitHub projects, for example, now where you can use some project planning as well, but not fairly sure about that integration because even with project integration with Azure DevOps, you see Azure DevOps mainly used for agile projects. And more or less, you see Microsoft project fairly used for just the, how we call it traditional projects where you have time and material, you have certain dates, certain amount of dates that you really have a really point in time where you want to finish up the product. And more or less with agile, you don't have that real endpoint in your projects. Mainly for our projects we do, we don't even use Microsoft project anymore. We just start out with a blank backlog and just fill it up and I hope to finish at the end. Right, well, that's one of the reasons why I think Planner has been growing because I think there's a much tighter alignment there. Yeah, I don't mean to pull you into an area that's not your specialty, it's just kind of interesting in your flow. No, it's true, it's very interesting. So you can see the integration with Microsoft to do with Planner, I mainly use to do as well for my own work. And I see, for example, if someone creates a Planner within our organization and just assign me tasks, I see them in my to-do list as well. So I find that very handy to have that small integration having my own to-do list, but also having my tasks that my coworkers give me as well in my own to-do list. So I don't have to put them in there myself and forget them. Right. I know if my colleagues can do it, they can assign it to me and I have a Q-date for those tasks. That's been that on the wish list for us that they've worked in the operations, the traditional IT roles for so long is no matter where a task is assigned to you, let me see it in one place, like give my view in that. Well, there's a lot of cool stuff that's happening on that side. Now, so you're a relatively new Azure MVP. When did you get your MVP? June 1st. Brand new. Yeah, really brand new. Brand new. I mean, you've been in the space for a long time. And so this is, I'm sure you probably heard from people being in the space for so long, being a certified trainer, being in the ecosystem, I'm sure a lot of people said like, they already thought you were an MVP. Yeah, I've heard that sometimes. Basically what I've been busy, I'm at it now about, since I was 20, I started blogging, mainly first on the SharePoint space. So I was a heavy SharePoint user and infrastructure man, really building up to SharePoint farms in those days, back in the days. Yep. And then I basically moved when SharePoint moved to Office 365, I saw more and less integration with Azure coming up. And then I just switched over from Office 365 to basically Azure and doing more Azure DevOps related stuff as well. I always was a fan of Team Foundation Server as well. Back in the days, developing features for SharePoint. So that came in handy as well. Really moving towards Azure and also starting blogging about Azure. So for example, if you look at my blog now, I still have those SharePoint articles in there. So I'm really that professionalistic on my blog is that even if I move over to another URL or another platform, I just move over all my old stuff as well. Making me busy days to get that over as well. But I just really love the stuff that I did then and also sometimes I just look at my blog and just I go back to the old articles, what I've written down. And sometimes also just fun to see that still people are reading those old posts as well. Well, it's interesting. I know this is a completely different topic, but like so I've been blogging on my site as the Buckley Planet. I've been blogging there since 2002. And so I moved over, I did a huge migration a few years back from TypePad over to WordPress. As I moved everything across, one of the things that as you know, you keep that long history of content. I too, I don't want to just remove it, you know? And so, but I'll go through and I'll remove, I'll retire, I'll archive where I'm talking about an event that happened 10 years ago or 15 years ago or just light-hearted things, but the heavier content, product, technology related, I want to leave that stuff in place because like people do go search and read on it. I'm always interested to see things that get surfaced there. But for performance of my site, you know, I realized that I needed to go through and I need to remove some of that retire, some of that old content. Yeah, so it's a constant calling that you need to go in and clean out. Well, interesting. So your path to MVP, so I mean, you just became an MVP, what kind of pushed you over the line? What got you there? I mean, you've been in the space for so many years. Yeah, what pushed me over the line is a good question. I always thought about it of being an MVP for basically one year or something, just in the back of my mind, just the acknowledgement of the things you are doing and basically then you are doing them good as well, I think. But basically also I really love my personal life as well. So you really have to weigh boundaries about that for what you want to do, how you want to do it. And basically last year I just also, I always did speaking sessions, so I founded the Dutch Cloud Meetup in, let me say 2019, early 2019, I think. That's basically a user group I now run with Caroline and Henry. And Henry Bani is also an MVP. And along the way, I just did some more speaking sessions as well. And basically moving over to doing more speaking sessions, I also had a conversation with, I don't know what his name is, Steffi-Jan Wigges. Steffi-Jan Wigges, he's also an MVP. And he just nominated me. I think it was December, just after doing a talk at Lowlands, Azure Lowlands in the Netherlands. He just nominated me and I just thought, okay, let's see how it goes. And here I am. Well, congratulations. It is, and for folks that are coming to this new that aren't as familiar with the program, it's an award for what you've done in the previous year, that body of work. And obviously to maintain it, to stay within it, there has to be a certain level of activity. One thing, I mean, you've said this a couple of times about having family. I'm now an empty nester. So it's like, I have a wife and a dog here, my kids are out and about in the world. But it was always difficult for the years of all the traveling that I've done. One of the benefits that I think that has happened over the last year, I mean, obviously we're all working from home and you have all these things online, what I don't think will change even as we start to move back into in-person conferences and different events and user groups and that things, I think we're going to maintain a certain level of online only activity. And so there's just more opportunities than ever to get in and to present, to participate. So if you're starting out. Yeah, I think even that there are too many events at this moment. I understand that argument as well. Yeah, and there has been a large amount of new events popping up everywhere. But that's basically not a bad thing, but I always think about the thing that we have to maintain quality as well. It's good that we have a lot of events, but you also need to make sure that all the events, we have maintained a certain quality. I'm not per se saying that my event always has that amount of quality. I always try to give it that amount of quality. But for example, we also want, we are eager to move to in-person events as well. But we are really looking at the COVID situation of course as well. So we hope to have our first in-person event again in September. Okay. But the numbers in the Netherlands are not that great at this moment. I'm not even sure if we're gonna make that, but we want to try. Yeah, so I'm doing my first in-person event this year, next month. So traveling to the Midwest. And I think that there, yeah, we're not quite, the numbers are not quite where we'd like to see it. I think it'll be, you know, it'll be a good showing. But we still have, I think there's like triple the number of people that have registered for the online, we're doing a hybrid event. Okay. The online will be even bigger than the last year. So I think total number of people participating will be great, but we were hoping to see more that have committed to being there in-person. I think it's still, you know, it's still a bit early to do that. So. The only thing I dislike from the online events is that there's such a large number of no-show. Yeah, yeah. Because of that it's easy and everyone is at home, it's just easy as well to not show up. We even saw them in-person events, but on online events it's even bigger. You know, there's a whole science behind that. I mean, so I've helped run SharePoint Saturdays for the last decade across the Western US and helped with the number of others. And we were seeing probably about a 40% drop in registrants from attendance. And so we just, you know, and it's difficult, as you know, when you're ordering food, you're paying for a capacity and then to be shy of those numbers, it's brutal. It's unfortunate to have that much waste, you know. Yeah, we really had it at our first event. I really remember that as well. So you had about, I think we had about 30 people signing up and basically you end up with 10 people, but you're buying pizza for 30 people. Right. So you can imagine how many pizza boxes were left at the office. Well, so now we have like a local soup kitchen and so we just take whatever's left and we go and deliver it after the event. And it's just one of the things that we do, which is great that we're able to do that, but I'd rather to have to raise fewer funds and buy less food and be more accurate in my numbers. But yeah. It's always an odd thing, I think. Yeah. So what else, so you talked a bit about what you're blogging about recently. So what are kind of the hot topics within the Azure space? Like what are you really passionate about right now? At this moment, I really passionate about doing bicep as well. So basically we're now taking it into production as well at one of our customers and really looking more into the GitHub space as well. Because the GitHub space was still a little bit new for me as well. So really picking up there as well, really looking at the new features, GitHub workflows, really picking up at that space as well. And I also still love to do basically everything ARM related. So I'm also looking at template specs, for example. Those are really just a little bit of an unknown feature for many of us, but it's a real great feature as well. Very cool. And for, so for those of us like I'm a marketing guy, no idea what bicep is. Okay. Yeah, bicep is just basically a new language that basically you write bicep and that ports to ARM. Meaning that it really makes it easy for you to write ARM templates because bicep is much easier to understand and basically together with the Visual Studio Code extension they built, you really get a large set of intelligences as well building up your bicep templates. Meaning that it's very easy to just port one bicep fell to a really large ARM template and use that for your deployment and how they are building it up now is that you can also just right away push your bicep fell into, for example, the Azure CLI for your deployment. So it will just do the compilation on the backend to an ARM template and then deploy it on the... Okay, I should. Awesome. Yeah, that makes a clear sense to me now. So, well, excellent. And I know that we're just about out of time here. So you talked about you've got your blog that's out there, are you doing a lot of video content out there as well? No, I've tried to do it sometimes. I basically still have fun video online, I think. But I really didn't really enjoy it. Basically the way I would like to do it, I will just do it over and over just to get it to that perfect state for myself. But as I try to record some things, I never get it to the perfect state. So I will be busy for a video of 10 minutes. I will be doing two, three hours just doing editing and everything else, just doing it over again. I really did not have a real good sweet spot, for example, for making those videos as well. Well, you know, one recommendation is, I mean, you're giving these presentations. And obviously there's some presentations which you're still actively giving. You may not want to just put that free out there on, as a video out there online, but even just going doing a recording of your presentation of something that you've moved on to do a couple new topics. And you just want to have a version of that as of your presentation out there. And where it's just that raw unedited, like doing a webinar, but it's just you, you know, a lonely night recording that. But capturing that, putting that content out there and then putting in the description, like timestamps to some of the topics, like the structure of your presentation can be a huge SEO boost. So you get a lot of value. A lot of people then can go and find on those specific topics within that video. But it's an easier way of doing it without the intimidating editing, post-production process of putting a formal video. That's true. Yeah, I know what you're meaning, but the only problem I have is basically when I turn on this camera, there is something in my, inside of my mind that just wants to do it perfect. And I even notice it when doing, for some sessions online, they just ask you to record the session upfront. Yeah. And it just spin up the video. And I really dislike that because even I've tried it now two times. And it's just terrible. With one session, I will be busy for about four hours, just getting it into some state I like. Right. And I just do it upfront live when I know that there are people listening. And then I still can try to get some kind of interaction with those people. Exactly. That's the key, right there. That's the thing I miss about doing the live. And people are quieter even when you do a webinar. And even if you have teams and have it open where people can jump in and ask questions, generally people are very quiet. When you're doing it live, you can see people's faces and read their reactions and be like, I can see by the glazed look in the eye that I should explain that a bit more and go and do something different. Or based on the questions that are being asked, maybe go into more detail on something that you hadn't intended to. Yeah, it's just a completely different thing. And yeah, I miss that as well. Well, very cool. That's your interaction part. Yeah, I agree. That's one of my favorite parts of it. You can have that one, like I've given a presentation where I've had the deck built and had examples and stories built into that. And I might give it three different times and have three completely different experiences because of questions and interactions. Because I do like to have, I say interrupt me, like jump in if you have a question and let's see where that takes me in the presentation. I really enjoy that. I miss that a lot. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Well, Mike, really appreciate your time today for people that want to follow you, get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you? You can reach me via Twitter, just basically my name, Mike van der Raag. You can reach me on my blog, MSFTplayground.com and you can also reach me on LinkedIn. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And of course, folks that are watching the video find this through social media. You can find a blog post about this with all of the links to all of the contact points at buckleyplanet.com as well. So really appreciate your time today and hopefully see you at the next MVP summit next spring. Hopefully that happens. Yeah, let's hope for it. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Talk to you later. Thank you. Bye-bye.