 Everybody this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat interview and I'm talking this afternoon with Purnima. Hey, hello. Hi, Christian. Nice to be here. Nice to meet you. So for folks that don't know who you are, why don't you give us the introduction, who you are, what you do and where you're located. Okay, I'm Purnima Nair. I am based in Baksha, UK, in a little village called Langley. So if you come my way, do say hi. Or find me on Twitter and say hi. My handle is Purnima Nair. I'm a freelance.net developer. So I do programming as my day job. And I live with my little girl who is six years old and my husband as well. And non-work me. I spend a lot of time with my family as expected. I read. I can read anything, anything that takes my mind off and just lets me relax. And I'm also learning karnatic music, which is a stream of Indian classical music. I've been doing that for the past three years, even though I have spent some time in my childhood as well as programming mother. That's it. End of life now. I like to kind of have my own passion and follow it as a, so you'll find me blogging about karnatic music. Not so often, but I do try just to kind of share what I've learned and what I listen to basically my own take on things. Which I blog about what I learn on the technical side as well. Again, I don't blog every day, but I try to when I have the time, just with the purpose of learning and sharing what I've learned so that it can help someone else. And I talk at a lot of events, mainly meetups and conferences. I'm a tech speaker as well. As Christian said, I'm Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and I've been doing a lot of work around Ambraco CMS, which is a dotnet based open source CMS. And I've been there MVP for the past two years as well. So I'm quite heavily involved in the developer communities, learning and sharing my knowledge with others as well. That's, you know, one of the things the advice that I've given to my I four adults, children and two that are STEM related career paths and two that are on the business side. And all four of them I've given the same advice about starting to blog starting to write about their experiences and what they're learning they're like well I'm not an expert on I'm like, that's not the process it's, it's, that's not the purpose. Like you obviously want to provide value, but a lot of it is about like talking through your experiences and what you're learning about, and what you've picked up and to be able to get feedback from others it's like it's the whole working out loud concept that that I believe in within the enterprise, you know where you're very transparent in the work that you're doing with your coworkers, so that you can, you know, draw upon each other strengths and create a better end result. That's the same idea, you've not yet built your community. You know as you're an individual starting out. And so encouraging them of course my, my oldest is already finished her masters and she's working as a professional she's actually funny enough after trying to get all my kids to learn all this technology that I work with. She is becoming a power BI expert and is learning those tools. She was the microbiology major and but anyway so that that's a great way to also kind of get involved with the community so what has been your community involvement and what's going on with community over right now I know things are a little bit different, but how are you staying connected. I think with, if I'm talking about the umbrella community we have a slack channel, so we are quite active on that then there's Twitter, everybody's on Twitter, so it's a very active world out there. And of course there's a big thing happening in the umbrella side of things these days because they are coming up with their document coercion. So it's very much active there. So we have like learnathons and meetups which are like on a regular basis. So I try to attend because everything happens in the evening time when my child needs me the most. So I try to keep our keep track of things. I do, but again, given the different kind of world we are in. I think it's up to each one of us to take a call on how active we can be. Some people are actually feeling the zoom fatigue because everything, everything is online. And people need us like off-screen time so I think it's up to people to people to understand what is the best for them. And again, when you talk about something like umbrella which is open source, you need to understand that it is up to you what you want to do. It is not like you have to be in front of your computer. You need to set boundaries on that for yourself otherwise it'd be overwhelmed. Well, I'm just going to make an observation too is like back when we were attending in-person events and there was the fear of missing out from these major events. And that's like a real thing especially if you're an MVP, if you're very active in the community, like you've got to be involved in part of it is a lot of what we are involved in doing the community. It's because we've been so involved in that. But with online, the difficulty is that the volume has increased. And so if you're trapped in that destructive FOMO cycle of feeling like you have to be involved in everything, there's just so much that's happening. So how do you select from those things besides the evenings which you've carved out for family? So there are events where I speak. So I have to be there. There are events which I really want to attend. So once in a while I tell my daughter that look, there's something happening like this. I need to be there. So she knows that I have a bunch of friends who I speak to. So she's happy about it. But again, I have to cut the balance and because when she comes back from school till the time she speaks, it's a matter of few hours that I have. And that needs to be her. So she is like the absolute priority for me in the evening. Everything comes after that. But again, then there are lunchtime meetings or there is the Slack channel or Twitter where I can say hi to people. So I do make sure that I do stay connected because they are my friends as well. Friends are important too. But when it comes to family and work, obviously family takes the priority. And we're talking about a six year old girl. Who is the next generation? So I need to be with her helping her out rather than thinking about myself there. Does she is she showing any interest in technology? I know she's still young, but I, you know, I so hoped that one of my children would be interested in going the technology route. And I think, I think I, you know, just my involvement and all the activities and them seeing me over the years, I think my youngest has the greatest chance of possibly go in this direction. But the other three are like, no, no. You take her through like the basic scratch, which is the first thing that he introduced to kids. So she's tried basic things, but she's still way too young for anything technology related. So she tries to understand things like she recreated her an email address just so that she can understand what email is all about. She can mail her grandparents or even her teachers. So there are things which we teach her. But again, she's at an age where she needs to explore and she needs to kind of understand she needs to develop the interest on her own rather than me forcing it on her. So we are kind of giving her all the options that she wants. Hey, there is this, there is this without kind of overdoing it. If you know what I mean. Yep. So she'll find her own rhythm. So for example, we took her to football classes when she was young. She went for a couple of sessions. She was done. She said, no, I can't do this. Was it was it all of the, was it all of the gear and the tackling. No, it was American versus I know the rest of football. He's he's like a really proper on the girl side. But he goes to the ballet class, and she absolutely loves it. So when, then she got into the primary ones, they had the options of giving fellow theatrics plus dance. She did all the trials he said I can't do the drama but I want all the dance. So it's like trying to make her understand that these are the options out there for you. Find your own thing. I think that's the best way to model them. I don't like forcing her into a path because she grew out of that interest very soon. Right. It's about, I love the, you know, and run into people that have used the phrasing of, of, you know, giving your children experiences to have so they could kind of carve the path and you brought up dancing. So my wife was formal was ballet gymnastics, but both of her parents my in-laws were gymnasts. And so she with my oldest is my daughter than three sons. My daughter, she was so excited to have her and dance in ballet. I remember after a huge show and and I, I love my daughter and I was so proud of her after this show. It was the end of the show season and like sign up for the new batch of classes. And she was six, I think six years old. And my, my wife says, are you excited about starting at the next level and dancing? My daughter says, no, I don't like dance. My wife, like I could see physically like her heart sink. And my heart just burst beer. She said, I want to play baseball. I want to do karate. Like, okay. So she did karate and baseball and played all the way up into and even played softball on the high school, the high school team. But again, it's about it. There's nothing wrong with having these experiences, figuring out which ones that you're really passionate about and going towards. And I would argue it's the same with like with technology. You can't force it. I would love for my kids to be more, you know, you know, plugged into what's happening with technology and not asking me so many questions, support questions. But yeah, I mean, they're doing some really cool things in other directions and just being happy in their success in those other areas. As long as they're not sitting at home, eating the food that I purchase, you know, and just watching TV and playing video games all day, but they're all productive members of society. So I should be happy at that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, give them the experiences, as he said, that's the right word. And then they'll choose from it. Yeah, it's it. I think it's, it's more important with kids because we are kind of bringing them up. I think it's something that we need to do to ourselves as well. That's the way I see it. Yeah, because in my world, technology, it's fast paced it grows like on a daily basis, it can be so daunting. But then, when you pick things up, when you try and understand what's out there it's important for you to understand what actually interests you, and what you're passionate about and learn that. You know, there's it's funny and so I advise companies when I was consultant and and this is something that I write about talk about a lot but is around the importance of for organizations to be good at change management, because things are rapidly changing evolving constantly new features coming out in the Microsoft ecosystem, of course at an incredible pace. I just question all the time like how is you do you as an MVP, how do you keep up with things and my first response jokingly as always like well I don't. I constantly feel like I'm falling behind, but I leverage the community, you know, like nobody's an expert in all things, but I, you know, I know people that are experts in certain areas and so I rely on them and ask questions and do that kind of thing but if you can, you know, just like try to train your organization to be good at recognizing and adapting to change, because companies that can do that successfully and quickly quickly leverage what is new, or be able to say no that does not impact us and move it out of the way and not be, you know, caught up in that. That's a great message for life and raising your kids as well. It's, you know, I mean change is hard as human beings, but if you can almost take that kind of, you know, that that that strategic approach to change management with with life and what it throws out you I think you'll be better able to handle all this. Yeah, absolutely. I'm off my soapbox now so what I feel is no matter how hard you try to keep up with the changing world and changing technology out there, you'll always be behind. There is no two ways about it. So I have completely accepted that so I'm caught in peace with myself over that. So I think it makes it a bit more easier once you have that acceptance so I think my advice is don't get into that vicious circle of I have to pick this up have to pick this up No, just go at your own pace you'll be fine. I think the hashtag is no more FOMO. No more FOMO. Absolutely. It's, once you do that, then you will find you being at peace and you will just carry on as a normal being. It's looking to miss out. Agreed. Agreed important, but so the last couple minutes here. So what kind of topics are you actively writing on speaking on right now kind of what are your hot topics. I blog about Ambraco because of that coming changes in Ambraco. And I just got done with my talk on GraphQL in .NET Co because I speak about a wide variety of things which kind of interests me, even though I don't work with GraphQL at all. My daily job is Ambraco and .NET based. So I pick up new things as well and try to share the knowledge. So GraphQL is something that I've spoken about recently and I'm speaking about it again in two weeks time, yeah, two weeks. And then there's Blazor, which is something again that I am passionate about. So I'll be speaking about that. So yeah, you'll find me around. Excellent. And for people that want to get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you via social or elsewhere at your blog? What's your blog? So my blog is pruneeman.co.uk and you can find me on LinkedIn. I do reply to messages on LinkedIn if you reach out to me. Then there's Twitter. I might not see it if it is on the message request, but I will try to check it ever so often and then try and get back. But yes, if you reach out to me, I will make sure that I reply to people. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It was great getting to know you and enjoy the, from behind you, it looks like it might be not raining, not overcast, like good weather out there. It's actually good weather, even though it's snowing in Inverness today. So yes, I need to go collect my car from the service station. So I'm off there. Well, have a great rest of your day and we'll see you hopefully in maybe next year at the next MVP summit, if we're Yes, absolutely. One familiar face to look out for then. It was lovely to know you, Chris, Christian. So.