 everyone. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Villa. Hello. Hello and thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you and for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? Right. So my name is Villa as we've already cleared and I'm an MVP data platform MVP from Sweden. I just became a data platform MVP like a couple of months ago and I work with a company called XOB, a bit hard to pronounce, but EXOBE.com and we are basically we are a consultant firm, we're 50 people and we only work with the Microsoft Cloud. So nothing else. We just focus on that and that's what I've been doing for six years now I think. So yeah that's pretty much my my. Was the company born in the cloud? Was it started? That's very cool. We're starting to see more and more of it like rapid growth of companies that didn't move from the on-prem world over into the cloud but actually started in the cloud. So it's yeah. There's probably a lot of research out there on differences between that. Probably. I mean that was even our like catch phrase that we had that on all our PowerPoints before like we were born in the cloud and EXOBE is actually a merge of two companies and the company where I were employed before that merged into this. We are the one who had the catch phrase born in the cloud and we were actually founded by three people where two of them were MVPs. So that's also kind of how I stumbled upon the term MVP and really started to understand like what is this community all about and what is this program and oh so those are the kind of people who stand there up on stage on these different events and you know inform me about all these cool stuff. Well now that you've brought that up so how would you define what an MVP is? Oh my definition of an MVP. I think it's someone who is very passionate about sharing your your knowledge to others and that's really the key point and I want to start with that because it has more to do with your willingness to share what you know rather than knowing everything in the field because there are a ton of people out there who knows more than I do in multiple areas in which you know where I am an MVP. But I think I think for me it's more about the shareability like you want to be up on stage you want to tell the world about the all these cool stuff and you don't really you don't really fear that people will take this and make it their own and just you know leave you behind. So yeah all these discussions about you know intellectual property and you have to you have to keep everything so well guarded my mindset is more like there's enough and there's even even too much like even if I shared everything I know even if I kept having educations every day people would still be you know oblivious to all the things that there is. So the issue isn't to keep everything to have something the issue is that I can't share enough really and I think that's for me is the mindset of a typical MVP. You know there were conversations when I became an MVP over a decade ago there were a lot of discussions of and it was true it was happening a lot of plagiarism but you know like just outright and I think it's still a problem from time to time where people will just steal blog content cut and paste and put their name at the top of it. You don't see it as often as you used to the tools are better to identify that and there was a lot but there was a lot of fear of I saw fellow MVPs that were going after people that properly cited their work so the citations were correct. They weren't plagiarizing they were saying like Villay said this and here and there's a link to the blog post or the article that you wrote in the blog post and there were everything that were going after those people saying you didn't have permission to to add that like to me that doesn't really make it doesn't make any sense if it's properly cited I understand if they don't put the citation in place and claim it as their own that's a different argument. Yeah yeah yes of course I mean if you steal something from someone else and don't give them credit and you get credited for that work that you stole yeah then I would also think that's a that's a bit of an issue but like for me the reason I put stuff out on Github or on my blog or on YouTube the reason is to spread awareness and spread information so I want people to copy those things like like usually when I do a blog post it's usually about some sample code or I'm doing a power bi piece and I'm putting together some some DAX code some formulas too yep but then since I'm doing that for the blog post I end up with a report anyway so I usually just save that report and put it up on Github as well so anyone can download it because I mean at the end of the day even if if it's there and someone can improve upon that then that's even better and I don't really care if people will steal those those things and I think for those simpler things like I've made this super simple calendar template that pretty much has any every metadata that you can imagine about a date so instead of just for me you to recreate a calendar table each time I'm doing a new report I can just copy and paste this code and then I have everything like what is the date what is the year what is quarter what is the day of the week and what's that what's the name of that day of the week and and everything that I might need in the report later on and and that code I mean I didn't invent that code so so I so I figured that that's not something you can steal from me I didn't I didn't come up with the concept right but I love you I think it's a high compliment if you do a detailed walk through a blog post for example and then somebody has gone out and this has happened to me several times in the past where they actually somebody will go into a blog post or a video where they're walking through the steps that I provided and they're doing right and I did this and I did this one a different way and like that's fantastic that's in fact just a suggestion to anybody out there that is interested in maybe becoming an MVP is is that's a great way to raise your level of visibility with MVPs and to make connections is provide that feedback to to do kind of a your own walk through of following those steps and providing your deployment experience of that thing of that piece of code of that best practice that was shared out there and then again the proper citations notify do a do a track back you know message to the blog post of the of the MVP that's that's the kind of interaction that I'd love to see that happen yeah I think I think before this discussion I would say 100 percent of the people the MVPs would be honored if someone made like a video of something they created and showed it wow this was so cool and I follow these steps but I did this slightly differently because that's in my opinion that's that's like proof that someone is actually getting value out of what I'm doing and that's also I think at least important for for someone like me like you do want to have some kind of appreciation for the work you put in right well it's you know I so I look at like I started my blog long time ago my my blog the one that I'm currently on with its name and domain started in 2004 so it's been been a while you know around and so I'm always you know grateful to get feedback on on things and comments from people and things that are out there but I I don't have a lot of that kind of interaction on my blog but I will see it in other places all I'll see that you know a a story a customer story an example that I saw or an article get referenced in somebody's presentation I'll be sitting at a community event like a SharePoint Saturday for example and somebody will mention and have a link to something I'm like wow that's really cool to go and see that you get that little extra buzz from from giving back but but ultimately I started my blog as more of a way it's great that other people are finding use but I did it more of a to kind of extend the the memory capability extend my brain you know yeah capture my own learning so I'm constantly going back and referencing like what did I find out about this and like oh yeah I documented that I blogged on this this point and I'll go back and check my own research into topics that's the way I kind of look at like how did I do this and right yeah I totally agree like before I before I started blogging since power bi is kind of like a passion for me I would use it to analyze anything like my vacational sleep I have an apple watch and I'm tracking my sleep schedule on it so I managed to to export all the data and then play around with that and just have fun with it right and and I did that for all kinds of stuff so I had all these reports just laying locally on my computer with stuff that I've I've made but I was the only one who saw it so so it became became became kind of like a natural thing to also put that on the blog and and expose that if not for for everyone else but at least for myself because I don't always have my own computer with me so I wouldn't always have access to these files now these days I could just put it in a one right folder but it's easier to just reach out on my blog especially when it comes to you know text and documentation it's it's one thing to open the report and then where do I put this and and maybe I don't have comments in the code that way that you would put in a blog so yeah it's I think there's always there's something that you know everyone really wants to nerd out about around the the data I have two of my kids one that is in healthcare and is in the analytics space and so she frequently is you know she's becoming an expert in Power BI and she's used other statistical analysis tools I've got a son who's about to finish his degree in what is it it's the atmospheric sciences his undergrad so he's uh we call him weather boy you know but he's also he's learned some arm python and started to do some other things uh you know around that me I mean weather data healthcare data not interesting whatsoever and I'm just like I can't really geek out about that no I mean use it collector and like if they're if Spotify had an open api maybe they do I just haven't explored it I I I got some news for you yeah do they thought yeah yeah and I'll tell you so I have there's like collectors there's different tools the things that are out there that I have I've been cataloging all of my music I would love to be able to go in take my catalog of music and be able to look at data of my music consumption because Spotify is my primary streaming tools that but also just public data about music data in it so for example uh end of year you know Spotify does the end of year statistics on your music listening so I am I am 0.005 percent of listeners of Duran Duran in the world so I'm like when I listen to Duran Duran most than more than just about anybody alive yeah and there's not a day that goes by that I'm not listening to some Duran Duran songs which those are not Duran Duran fans then you know to that for you your unhappy life but anyway but it's uh I would love to be able to go in and slice and dice that data and look at my my collection versus the the the data and what's being used for and it just be fascinating so actually I had kind of like the same thought at you if you want to I can share my screen and show you something from my blog yeah so uh so I had the kind of like the same idea that upcoming the upcoming new year and Spotify would say like this is the music that you've been listening to the most and so in November I I went into the Spotify website I went into my account and I saw that you can download all your personal data like because of DDPR that you can always do that right so I just I just order my my data and within a couple of hours they sent me a zip file with all the JSON files of all my streaming history and all my playlists and everything they had on me and so I used that for this particular report but I also started to research the research and I found the API so they do actually allow you to to ask questions about your streaming history and special artists and uh well albums and and everything like and I figured and I figured first like maybe they have information on which country does the artist reside from and that's all of information because that makes sense but I found they have so much more like they actually analyze the songs and they give it a score or for for example for energy and dance ability and stuff like that so based on the based on the content of the of the song they can actually like determine this is this is an easy song to dance with or to dance to and combined with like the country from from where the artist resides as well as how much energy it is you can really ask questions to the API and get a very good recommendation list well that's why you know they have you know the platform like this I mean this is fascinating to me because like the the AI that's in place um to suggest songs and put together a list based on your history and that's why it is important when I when you come across a song within a playlist like that that you just don't like not just to skip but to actually do a thumbs down so that it learns why it'll it'll pick up like your listening time in fact you skipped it but something if you really dislike it you know the thumbs down so that it's okay that's not it's it's constantly looking at the listening patterns and creating and pulling from the the the listen and and that's why it's able to do like by genre like I listen to three or four distinct genres and it puts together very distinctive playlists around each one of those so it's yeah it so I didn't realize that they had that stuff that's open but it makes sense that it's out there yeah it really does yeah so uh if you if you want to you can allow me to share to show my screen and I'll show you the because I actually I actually made two things out of this blog post first of all I just well three things I I made the blog post itself so you can read about like my insights that I made on the report I also made a link to my github site so you can download the template download your own Spotify data and simply just tell Power BI which which folder did you put the JSON files in and it's gonna create this report for you which is it's just gonna go back about 12 months so are you able to are you able to share yet yes yes I am there we go so and you can also click here to actually play around with my my report so here using Power BI for your Spotify data from last November I made the graphical interface look like the Spotify player to kind of get this look and feel and if you if we scroll down it's it's about how I created it and what the different pages are actually representing but if we go up here all the way to the top you know I should let me frame this for everybody watching like I didn't know that he blogged about this like this was not a set up at all this yeah right right you had no idea that I was a music collector and and fan around this but you know honestly I didn't know that he did all this so anyway sorry I did you it was just happened to be a very good coincidence right so here here you can download the report for you for yourself and at the bottom of this blog post I'm having some instruction on how you can connect your to your own data but if you click here you can actually look at my data and my report live in in this web browser so first of all I have 28 playlists on Spotify and they have 3,500 tracks in them however there are 2,945 unique tracks because I tend to you know put a lot of duplicates in them and then some like overview information right and then if we go to playlist you can drill down into your playlist like I can see the different ones here how many followers do I have how many tracks are them how many distinct albums and distinct artists do I have but if we go the other way around I can actually look at like this in flames only for the week is apparently in three playlists and it's these three so it's it's all also like a cleanup tool for me to go through through my playlists and kind of clear out what I don't want to have in here and what you said about streaming history I created this view so basically you get some KPIs up here I've streamed 27,000 tracks in total for this year which amounts for about three and a half thousand hours I tend to have Spotify on during all the way workdays so so that might be one of the reasons and I also shared at this point I shared my my account with my wife so half of this is probably hers like Sam Smith is not really mine but but if I click on for example yeah sure yeah so if I could click on for example equilibrium I get a list of all the tracks that I've been listening to from them and how many times have I played them and how many hours have I played this specific music but now it also creates this accumulated graph so when we look here you can see that I had kind of like a time when I didn't listen that much to them but when it goes steep it means that I I listened a lot to this this artist and by the time of the 14th of May last year I had listened 577 times and 101 hours and then it continues you can really dive into your own data like this and also if we make this a bit bigger when during the hours of the day did I listen to this or artist the most like I listen to it 60 times at 2100 hours but we can also do it the other way around of course this is barbie I so if I click on on that one this will instead show me what kind of songs did I most listen to during well 9 p.m in in the hour yeah why am I going to falling asleep so angry every night yeah exactly and this would be the reason maybe not so much equilibrium at night maybe more like slow music maybe yeah and then I listen to death metal that's right I actually usually put my daughter to sleep using using equilibrium so as you like she likes it well I noticed by the way on the last list that you had there you had the band Papa Roach that's a from where I'm I so Northern California band that was from the era when I was the lead singer of an alt rock band and in in Northern California and so we never we never played with Papa Roach but they were playing live all over all over California at the time back in the early 90s but anyway that's also something that we didn't really know actually that we didn't talk about before and sort of just happened yeah so yeah so this that's fantastic history well what is what do you think is under weird insight though no idea so I went a bit bananas with this but so I found out I've changed track 4300 times before 30 seconds I have listened to 289 tracks where the name is more than 50 characters long super weird that is weird insight yeah why not and then what is my favorite track based on the day of the week and my most favorite one is I found a calculator down here which tells you how many calories you burn by listening to music so how much calories does it take for your brain to to make sound into you know something that you can actually understand and you can use this what if parameter to say how much you wait and if you wait 101 kilos then this you would have burned for 462,000 calories which is about equivalent to 4600 apples just by listening to music all great data that's right excellent that's awesome that's awesome yeah there's a it would be fun to go in and put something like that together well that's the thing about when you have that the data set and start going and looking at those differences even looking at like what's the calorie burn per genre that you're listening to and yeah and you can look at something like well how many cal for the same genre how many calories am I burning at different times during over the course of the day yeah do I you'll burn more or less of listening to this so you can optimize your music listening to burn the most calories and be like oh oh it's three o'clock I need to switch genres you know exactly getting a bit fat here maybe I should switch to more but others you know what's this is fascinating because it's like uh what I uh like in business school in the late 90s I was dreading going through and taking my stats class and it ended up being one of my favorite classes during my during grad school because it was less about the calculus the technical like what you're actually doing and was more about the context the use of the statistical analysis and the business application of those things and and so this shows while we're talking about some things like these weird stats it may not be you know relevant to anything around this but now you you start to understand the importance of going in and looking at data for like product management why is it that all of the leading companies uh you know Microsoft is a great example started hiring data scientists and you know for every single product team is starting to look at what are the usage patterns what are we seeing why are some new features driving again engagement more than others and how we can prioritize some of the different like what we focus on not just because of selling net new licenses but increasing engagement and adoption of the tools and systems so you can make truly planned intelligent decisions about what you go and build yeah it's definitely because actually that that's actually kind of how I started my MVP journey I decided I want to become an MVP and at that point I was actually working more towards adoption and how to use the different services in in Microsoft 365 and so I figured I'm going to become an office in apps MVP and then I worked for that for a while but then I always fell back on Power BI right on the power platform so I would drive these adoption adoption campaigns but I will always use Power BI to determine which users to focus on and which groups to focus on and what to do with this and eventually I decided that like everyone is becoming an office in apps MVP everyone is a team's MVP so I'm going to go with the power platform MVP and I didn't really read up on that because there's no such thing as a power platform MVP it turns out that right technically well technically it's under the the focus area of of you know of data application yeah business applications data platform and business application there's some on either side of that either one you can still refer to yourself as a power platform MVP and that's okay too yeah yeah yeah it is okay it's just that when I started to you know make all these contributions with that you have to do to become an MVP then I kind of split them split them up between power apps power automate and power bi and some even some power virtual agents and then when I started to fill them in in the website I realized that now I have like 50 50 and it's not enough for either of them so so yeah and then I decided I actually became a fast-track recognized solution architect it was last year the first time and then I decided I'll go ahead and just focus on power bi and then this year I finally made it and became a data platform MVP it's a good area it's a good focus I know quite a few that are within that space it's a so you're a good company over there as well yep I I've noticed yeah it's it's a it's a fun area well well I think you know thank you for taking the time and and going deep dive into on the music side I could geek out for hours on the music it's in the analysis side now I need to go take a look at your blog post I need to go build that for myself um so my wife and another side project to take me away from you know giving my wife attention but anyway it happens it happens but really I really appreciate your time for people that want to find out more about you or connect with you what are the best ways to reach you the best way would be on either LinkedIn or Twitter so on LinkedIn we let Gulf Strand and on Twitter it's Villa Sierkeviking and I don't know do you do post these on I will post all the links it'll be in YouTube it'll be on the blog as well so you'll have everything so you can scroll down people and you can find all the links there nice nice and thank you so much for having me it was great meeting you and hopefully see you next year at the MVP summit if it happens in person yeah I hope I hope I know hey well thanks a lot for your time we'll talk to you soon