 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and I'm here today with another fellow MVP, dual MVP actually, and Microsoft Regional Director Rainer. Hey, hello. Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me. Glad to be on your show. So people that don't know you, who are you, where are you, what do you do? My name is Rainer Stropik. I live in Austria in Europe. I have a small company here which is called Software Architects and I code for living. That is what I do. That is what I'm passionate about. I love writing code. I always say every day where I can write code is a really good day. Unfortunately, there are a lot of days where I can't write code, but still, yes, this is what I'm passionate about. I have been writing code that is somehow related to cloud computing for over 10 years now. So I started with Azure with the very first technical previews. So that is essentially what I do, building solutions in the cloud based on various technology like Node.js, C-Sharp, .NET, Go, and many other technologies. Well, that's interesting. So I'm assuming for clients, are you building products, are you like an ISV type solutions where you're building things and reselling them, or what kinds of solutions are you building? Oh, both. When we started our current company, we is my wife. She's a programmer too. She's an awesome UI developer. We started a previous company together, and approximately 12 years ago, we thought we would like to do something else because previously, we were always working in the consulting space and we wanted to feel how it is to create an off-the-shelf product. And this is what we did. We sat down, we sold our shares to the previous company, and we sat down two years without any customers. That was an awesome time. So we started on a green slate. I think the answer is kind of chuckle, as you say, is awesome time. Yeah. I'm sure it was awesome for you. It was absolutely awesome because how often do you have the chance to really build an off-the-shelf product with a brand new technology like Azure from the ground up where you take yourself and a small team and you take yourself two years of your life and just build something and then try to make a living out of that. And that is what we essentially did. So we sat down, we wrote a kind of platform, nowadays you would call it a low-code platform. And based on that low-code platform, we built, we call it a domain-specific development platform. We built various products. One of the products, TimeCockpit, is we marketed ourselves. And we also built some customer products for partners who market this software. The common denominator about all the things we do with software as a service. So nowadays, we have our own products. We have products that we built for partners. And we also spend a lot of time helping customers, small, medium, and large ones, to do the transition from the traditional IT, traditional, licensed-based software development towards software as a service on all levels. From DevOps, to cultural transition, to technical transition, up to business models, pricing schemes, and all this stuff. This is what we do. I mean, it's kind of the story of almost every ISV out there, where they, it's interesting as you go through, and I am probably thinking of a handful off the top of my head, but that are in the Microsoft ecosystem that were SIs, consulting companies, that went and said, you know, we're doing, we're seeing patterns in our engagements with our clients. I see there's an opportunity for a product here. And so I'm going to go and build something that will speed up on our, you know, our consulting kind of an accelerator for our consulting efforts that turn into a product that they go and then start selling. And they make that transition over to an ISV. And certainly, it's the, with the, you know, software as a service space, it's become much easier, much less expensive, lower barriers or entry to have a product idea. And for a consulting company to build something or just an expert, you know, a coder, an engineer that with an idea, or to partner with a company to come in and build that kind of IP. That's interesting because my experience as an entrepreneur is really very much different. Really? Yeah, really. We have built products before, let's say the pre-cloud era. And yeah, we managed to do that. And it was from a financial point of view. It was, it was rather easy. It was a quick win. It wasn't that difficult to finance. But when we transitioned to software as a service, one of the things that I really became aware of when, when doing my own business is that it's super hard to make a living out of software as a service. Because if you think of, I have to describe that. We build business to business software. We don't build end customer software. So our customers are typically medium to large enterprises. So in the past, in the pre-software as a service area, we built something and when we had a customer, we sold licenses to the customer and we got a ton of money upfront. We had that money. And well, if the customer did a wrong decision, hopefully not, we had the money. We got a little bit of money, let's say maintenance stuff in the upcoming years, but we had the money. So the cash flow was immediate and rather a big load of money upfront and then small amounts of money for maintenance. But with software as a service, you still have to pay all the employees. You still have to pay all the investments that you do for development, for designing this stuff, but you don't get a lot of licensing upfront. For instance, for our own product, we charge for a single user, seven euro, that's, I don't know, eight to $9, something like this per month. So when you start with, let's say, a few hundred users, that's only a very small amount of money that you get each month. Over time, the total customer value is really great and it's more interesting than building an IS, classical ISV product. But from a cash flow point of view, from the point of view of an entrepreneur who wants to build a company that is financed from its own cash flow, I don't want to have venture capital that I'm a European. So we don't have this venture capital culture here. I have to finance it on my own. It was really hard and much harder than I thought. Well, so I don't think that there are two statements are mutually exclusive. You're right, so I've seen the same thing and that actually, I think, in my experience, so I left Microsoft in 2009 and I worked for most of the last decade for ISVs. And so saw that struggle firsthand of moving from that on-premises model to the cloud and that licensing struggle. Microsoft struggled with that initially. I mean, every company that is making that move and those companies that could weather that period like you did for two years of going and building something and seeing how it works out, just start building that business. And you see some of the ISVs that made early investments, it's just now starting to pay off. It's making sense because they were early and they were able to weather that time. And certainly there are vendors that are out there, ISVs that continue to develop for and support their on-prem or hybrid environments just because they can recognize greater revenue by still supporting those scenarios even though they understand that the future is out in the cloud and that's where things are moving. But you're right. I was talking about the IP creation. You then made it real by talking about then making money off of what you're building and making it worthwhile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the point of view of an IP creation, yes, it's much easier because you don't have to deal with so many detailed problems. I mean, what Azure platform as a service, software as a service, what modern framework gives you is enormous. If I think back 10, 15 years, I made a living of helping customers to install SQL Server clusters. Nowadays, I mean, that's 30 seconds at a single line of Azure CLI or a PowerShell and you're done and you have the most reliable database cluster you could ever think of. And 15 years ago, this would have been a huge project. And if you wanted to do something like that, it wouldn't have been possible. So definitely. It's not just standing up servers and getting those environments going, but the optimization of those environments. Absolutely. The system is coming back and providing you details on, hey, here's how you can improve what you've deployed. And there are some interesting partner solutions. And I know some fellow RD that has created a solution which is going and provides add-on guidance on optimizing your Azure resources as an example. So what's some of the stuff that you're out there actively talking about presenting on right now? What are your hot topics? Oh, I have so many topics. What are the hot topics currently? It changed because of the whole COVID stuff. So essentially, I canceled all my personal appearances on conferences until the end of the year. That was a hard decision, but it had to be made. So I do a lot of meetups and I do a lot of virtual conferences. And my talks are primarily currently focused on the whole Azure. And I would say in Azure, specifically the DevSecOps topic, that is something that is really hot now in Azure, because there are currently a bunch of new services coming out which are, on my point of view, real game changes in terms of DevSecOps. And from the development side, I talk a lot about .NET because .NET 5 is around the corner, C-Sharp 9 is around the corner. So I try to bring together those two things. How can we use the latest versions of .NET Core and .NET 5 and the latest language versions inside of Azure to really build, to really build interesting solutions? That's the professional side. And on the, let's say, community side, that's more the kind of technologies that I'm really passionate about for the future. Currently, Rust is the topic that I'm really very much into it. We are currently starting a new meetup here in my hometown. It is a Rust meetup and we are very excited. We start in August. We do a monthly meetup. It will be in English, so it is not just for Austrians. If you Google rustlint, rustminuslint.at, maybe I can give you the link and you can add it to the video description. Everybody can join. We have awesome speakers from, for instance, Microsoft in the first meetups. And yeah, it is a meetup where we want to give all the people who are interested and curious about this brand new programming language, which also starts to play a role in the Microsoft ecosystem, who are curious and want to learn. So it's not just a deep dive for experts, but it should be a meetup where also people find something interesting who are just learning. So this is from the community side, the thing that I'm very much passionate about currently. And that's great. I mean, obviously during this quarantine period, as things are slowly opening back up, I mean, they're still, like you, I've also canceled all of my in-person for the end of this calendar year and really difficult to do. We have an annual formerly SharePoint Saturday and a Microsoft 365 Friday event, which it typically happens the first or second weekend in February of every year. This is gonna be our eighth or ninth year, I think ninth year in a row of doing it. We're really nervous about, you know, watching to see, you know, are we gonna be able to do this in-person event? And we'll come up with something if that doesn't happen. But in the meantime, we've really bolstered the community activities. I host a lot of guest webinars for our user group. We have multiple user groups. So we do a lot of cross promotion of activities across them. What are some of the other community things that you're involved in? Two things. One is my big passion. It's working with kids. I am a chairman and co-founder of the local Kododojo, which is a programming club for kids between eight and 17. And I spend a lot of time organizing events, working as a mentor, setting up events. We do every single Friday, we do five to seven workshops, many, many hours, many mentors, all four kids, everything virtual. So I love this. I really love working with kids and juniors and young coders and see how they playfully and joyfully explore the beginnings of the world of software with things like Scratch and JavaScript and Python and of course a little bit C-sharp and so on. So that is really an important part of my work with the community. And the second project that I'm currently involved in, I am very happy and a little bit proud that I made it into the group of the final 18 candidates for a seat at the board of directors from the DotNet Foundation. I think the DotNet Foundation is a really important foundation when you work with DotNet. And I offered my help and yeah, we will see the election period starts tomorrow in fact and it will take until I think August 3rd. So I can encourage and I would like to take the opportunity to encourage everybody to take a look at the DotNet Foundation website. If you are not a member yet, please become a member. It's important. They need the support from the community and then you can join in the election and vote for the next board of directors. Well, we'll definitely, I'll provide a link to that out there. I know we'll have a little time in this period. What's this is live as well, but yeah. So I mean, talk a little bit about like what do they do? What will you do if you get elected to that? So what will be your role? The DotNet Foundation is the foundation that supports open source project. There is a list of member project. Everybody who builds an open source project that is somehow connected to DotNet can apply for a membership at the DotNet Foundation. And if you become a member project, they will provide you with various support options. That is from legal support to many other options. It would be too much to go into the details in this interview. Everybody can look up the details on the website. And the foundation also cares for the big open source projects like the C-Sharp compiler, the DotNet framework and the UI frameworks and many of the open source project that everybody of us DotNet developers love and use on a daily basis. So they coordinate and support these open source project. And beside that, they also support and coordinate the community by supporting meetups for instance, by coordinating speakers and content. They support the creation of learning content and so on. And the board of director is voted for a limited amount of time and they are essentially the group of people who are together deciding about where to put the emphasis on in the next few months. And that is what the board of director does. So it's people from the community who volunteer for dedicating a certain amount of time to take a look at these projects, to speak with the community heroes who build these open source projects to ask them what they need and then to target the support of the DotNet foundation into the right direction. That's essentially what the board of directors does and what the DotNet foundation is all about. Well, excellent. Well, I'll definitely provide a link and encourage people to go out and vote for you. Thank you very much. Yeah, for sure. But there are so many great people there. So take a look at the candidates. They have videos online. Everybody stands for a certain, let's say emphasis might be emphasis is working with kids and juniors. That is what I would personally like to bring on to the table. So not just waiting for me, voting for me, just take a look at all the candidates and then decide on your own where you want DotNet to go. No, indefinitely. And I was gonna ask you about the children connection. Is that a local group or is that a global? Is it, you know, people can get involved with that? Kododojo is, yeah, absolutely they should. Kododojo is a worldwide community. It started in Ireland and nowadays, I think there are more than 1,200 Kododojos all across the globe. I think in more than 100 countries, Kododojos are volunteer led programming clubs. So it's completely free. You must not earn money with this. It's completely free and it's very, very easy to join. So kids should come to these clubs. They find mentors. Mentors don't teach in the classical thing. So it's not a school. It's not support for school related things. It's really joyfully exploring technologies. So you come with your project. If you are a kid and you are interested in technology, you can ask a mentor if you don't have an idea. If you already have an idea, just come to the code, find like-minded kids and work on your projects together with them. And the mentors who are in our case, typically professional software developers, they are there to support you. So we listen to the projects that our club members do and then we maybe offer a workshop that will give them a little bit of the base knowledge in order to build and build their project successfully or maybe sometimes they are struggling with some technology and then we help them overcome the problems. We have a huge number of pre-built exercises. Let's call it hands-on labs for children where if a child comes and doesn't have an idea what she or he should do and we provide these exercises which provide sample solutions but always give the freedom to adjust the idea, to add something to the idea. This is how cododoges work. It's, as I said, completely volunteer driven and I think it's amazing what the cododoges foundation has built over the years. Maybe you might know the cododoges foundation if I tell you that they are together with the Raspberry Pi foundation. So Raspberry Pi foundation and cododoges foundation, they are one organization and they bundle their power in order to bring, for instance, the Raspberry Pi and all the great things that you can do with it to schools and children. So I've heard of it just because it was brought up in the planning, as I see here, also participate with the Global to Azure Bootcamp. So I helped produce that here locally, annually so the last two years and as well as the Windows and the, now Microsoft 365 Bootcamp efforts. So these are Microsoft sponsored events and I think it was last year or two years ago so I've done that one for three years, the formerly the Office 365 Developer Bootcamp where we actually gave away some Raspberry Pi so we had a couple presentations where they leveraged those and then gave those away to the audiences. But we also had a local, a similar Code Camp for Kids sponsor some of our events this last year. So it's always great to promote those links we'll add those to the blog post as well because I think, especially in this time that we're in where most kids are at home give them something to do and learn and have fun but also have that community aspect. I don't think that you can start too early in getting your modern kids to kind of plug in and understand the power of community and how to leverage the collective knowledge of people with shared interests through these sites. They understand the social aspects but from a professional and certainly within a personal development, a learning forum to be able to plug in to some of the global community from around these technology areas I think it's just, it's an incredible opportunity for kids to learn from practitioners. Absolutely and for instance, it's so important, software is so important in our world and we thought a lot about how to teach kids how to make them interested in the base technologies for instance, learning how to collaborate on a platform like GitHub and so on. If you approach children and young coders like you approach professionals by telling them hey, that's important and you need to understand the Git protocol because it's widespread they are immediately bored and go away but if you give them an interesting project a problem that they want to solve for instance, currently our kids are the hottest thing is writing discord bots this is something that they all want to do and suddenly multiple of them during the COVID crisis would like to cooperate in building a discord bot and suddenly it makes sense to teach them about Git and GitHub and collaboration and open source and suddenly we talk about licensing models because of course they all dream to build the next big startup and with that that is exactly what we want to do. We want to kind of sneak in useful technology and knowledge without them even recognizing that they are learning something. They are passionate about a certain project they have the right context and then they are willing to learn and that is I think a kind of learning that is super important. Unfortunately, I don't know about the US but in Europe the school system doesn't work like that at all. They still have the classical you have to learn that and this and that and trust me and I am the teacher and I tell you and sometimes I force you but only a few schools really managed to motivate kids by giving them interesting projects that the kids are passionate about and then support them by providing the necessary information they need to understand in order to succeed with these projects. I think that is exactly the right way how we can also solve the problem the talent crisis that we have in IT instead of teaching theory for computer science. It's crazy thought but different people have different learning styles. It's crazy so some kids do really well and similar here in the US where you have other some public but private and charter schools of things that I think very few public but a lot of private and charter that support that model and certainly if you're able to you live in an area and are able to take advantage of a program where it has a limited number of students in the program so there's a better teacher and student ratio and it has more to do with project work and reading and comprehension and taking actions than versus wrote memorization of facts and taking tests and I'm not entirely knocking that method of the memorization test taking model because there are some kids that do very well and retain that and they perform very well. That's not the way my brain works. I was very much a hands on and I did well in certain subjects. It wasn't until high school where I went to an alternate model school where I had a one-on-one tutor a couple times a week it was able to kind of go at my own speed and accelerated. I graduated high school in two years and it's crazy thing to think about. I did very well in the subjects that I was passionate about. It's funny how that works, you know? And so I just I absolutely loved once I got into at the university level and go and take the classes that I enjoyed and follow that program and did very well in the classes I cared about. Not so well in some of my general education courses that I was forced to go and take. Probably would have done better as a couple times, couple of companies I've worked with that have tried to get me to go into programming and go down that track and I, it wasn't a fit for me at that time in my life. I'm now kind of kicking myself for not going and doing that. But I've had several times where I have because of that one-on-one where I had advisors and teachers that make recommendations based off of that learning style. So yeah, that's just a credit to teachers and my mom was very aware of, Christian has a very different learning style. He needs a different kind of education here and much more collaboration focused and conversation and going and one-on-one time with the teachers and reading and paper writing and that kind of stuff. So, anyway, so I was lucky that way. But anyway, well, Rayner, people wanna find out more about you, get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? I think one of the best ways to get in touch with me or follow me whatever I do or recordings on YouTube is essentially Twitter. So I'm our Struppec on Twitter. Whenever I publish something or whenever I speak somewhere and so on, I typically send some Twitter messages. There is also a website that all the RDS have. It's RaynerStruppec.me. It's a kind of, let's say, a kind of business card out there and on the bottom of this page you have all the links to my YouTube channel, to my LinkedIn profile and so on. So yeah, I am lucky because my name is not that common. So if you Google me together with something like Azure or C-Sharp, you will probably find the sites and it's not that difficult to get in touch with me. Twitter is probably the best way. And I always like to throw in there at the end, too, is that people that are MVPs or RDS, in this case, both of us are both of those things. We are some of the most approachable people out there. Like we thrive in community so don't be shy, reach out to Rayner if you have any questions about anything that he's talked about today. Absolutely, a few days ago, a visitor at the conference sent me an email and we had email conversation up and forth and we talked about various C-Sharp concepts for multiple days and it was a lot of fun. He enjoyed it, I enjoyed it. So yeah, don't be shy. Just send us emails and get in discussion. We love that. This is why we are MVPs and RDS, aren't we? Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks so much for your time this evening and taking some time away from the family. But hopefully, I'll see you sooner rather than later. I know we don't have this summit next spring, but I'm... Maybe it will be a virtual summit, let's see. There will definitely be the virtual summit. So we'll see you online soon. Thank you, thank you for having me, Chris. Bye, have a nice...