 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today Rudy. Hello. Hi. Hi Quasim. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Wonderful to be in a show. 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? I'm 30 years old. I live in a small city called Steenberg and I guess never, no one heard of that but it's a small city near the Belgian border, near a city called Breda, maybe some other guy that was on your show was living in Breda, so I guess you know Breda, got a wife, two kids, a dog and that's about it. And I'm also working at a small company called DeltaCom as a CTO. Excellent. Excellent. And I always like to ask because Enterprise Mobility is a pretty broad amorphous city. So like what do you focus on within that area? I guess everyone knows me, the guy who troubleshoot autopilot. So autopilot in tune after that breaks around it, I look at it and I will hopefully fix it. That's a very active space. So what was your, so you've been a, is this a second or third MVP? Second. Second time. Hopefully I'm getting renewed for the third time but I guess I am. We're all going through the renewal process and putting all the stuff in. Such a pleasant process. Yeah. Yeah. I'm always, I'm looking at, oh yeah, I need to do that one. Yeah. And actually, oh yeah, I still need to do that. I have multiple reminders set up for that as well. So what was your path to becoming an MVP? Like what was your background and what led you towards the MVP program? It's not a path. It's just something I rolled into, stumbled onto, but yeah, I'm working in IT for about 20 years now. The old school legacy stuff, remote desktop, thermal service, active directory and all that kind of stuff. But in a certain point of time, I moved on to Microsoft Revive Cessar exchange and a little bit in tune and I was talking, I guess, three years ago, four years ago with Jasper Benard, someone that's a CTO that time at Wartel, Belgium, Netherlands and he convinced me to put my ideas into blogs and so I did. And while trying to share the knowledge I had with other people in the community and talking to Alexander Fields, he got me nominated. So he nominated me to become an MVP. OK, the first time I noticed that email, I was like, OK, that's cool. That's nice to notice that I'm going to be nominated. That's fine. And while talking to another guy, Damon from Robby's, if I announce it correctly, but a French guy and great guy. And I was talking to him and he was like, aren't you an MVP yet? No, not yet, but I'm talking with the person responsible to become MVP. And he was like, I know her. So it's OK for me to send her an email with my opinion about you. I was like, yeah, why not? So he sent her an email and the next month I became an MVP. So that was just three days before my birthday. I got the email the first of June that I was an MVP in enterprise mobility category. So that was a nicer birthday present at that time. You know, one of the hardest things is for a couple thoughts there because I've had plenty of friends that start started like early in their career doing desktop support, you know, imaging machines, being that kind of Google operations, I.T. behind the running cables, you know, under desks back. Yeah, that kind of stuff. I know I have two friends that started that way. And one had a degree in music, music composition. The other one had no degree in both their CTOs now. They just kind of, you know, after 20 plus years, just kind of moved up into those, those roles on the ladder. But just were self taught, picking up technology trying to understand how stuff works. And I mean, that is a great roadmap for problem solving. And I know the whole background from Windows three and eleven, five, nine, five, the whole. And for me, it's still the same. I'm looking at the issues in the same way I did back in the days, but now with some new technology. But everything, the top of shooting guide is still the same for me. Yeah. Well, one of the hardest things is for, you know, people and those kind of technical roles like that is you like, how do I surface that? How do I share what I'm doing? And that's that can be a difficult thing. I mean, I don't know if you picked up, if you prefer writing versus video, like what are your primary contribution types? For now, for now, it's writing blocks because the first time I went over first, why my first blog, it was like it wasn't the best I wrote in years. But OK, it was something. But the more time you spent in something, the better you become. So writing blocks is the thing I do now. But apparently I'm going to present some nice sessions at MMS Moa in a couple of months. So that's going to be fun. The first time being of delivering a session about the stuff I do best and sharing that knowledge on MMS Moa, that's going to kick ass. Did you I mean, did you struggle with with sharing some of that content or was it fairly easy for you? I guess in the beginning it was a little bit hard to find a proper way to tell a story and while telling a story, showing the people how to take a look at an issue, how to solve that issue, which tools you can use to solve that issue. And for now, and now it's like, yeah, I'm looking at something and I'm such as I can write a perfect book for that. Today, I was also someone who reached out to me with a TPM at the station issue I never heard of before. So I was like, OK, send me every information you have. I'm going to look at it while looking at it. I also reached out to some guys at Microsoft and I know they are aware of the issue. So that's going to be another block soon, I guess. That's it. It's a great way to put it is that, you know, it's not just going to solve the problem, be done with it, walk away. But think about how can I, you know, well, you need to know. Yeah. And you need to you need to tell a story. So it will stick if you just put out the facts. It's not going to stick at people. They if you read a story just like reading a book, if you read a book, you can you can remember it. But if I only throw facts at you and this is a setting you need to do, this is a setting you need to configure. That won't stick. But telling a story with the conversation in it or at which parts you need to look. In my opinion, that's a better. Well, that's an important difference, too, is because you may have gone in in your research, you found somebody that solved part or all of it. Technically, yeah, your use case, how you applied it, the story around that, the customer scenario. I mean, all that more important thing you work in, you know, could be it might where somebody can go and find your article touching on something. If you're referencing that, that article, somebody else wrote around that or the Microsoft documentation, but they may find your story more engaging. It may they may connect with that where they didn't connect with another story. And I love details. So I'm not going to tell a simple story. If I tell something, it's full of details and sometimes a little bit too much, but I like to take a peek at how stuff exactly works. Not only I hate it when somebody tells me, this is how it works. Are you sure that's how it works? Because I want to know how it works. I want to look at the DLL files behind it. I want to know how the Pogman traces works, how the whole flow works out. Well, I mean, the other side of that, too, is that there's, you know, with every question, there's nuances to that. There's, like, so we do a lot of as I help put together AMAs, so the Ask Me Anything panel discussions around technical topics. And it's not just there's a whole discussion sometimes of they're asking to solve this problem. We talk about what are the different ways that could lead them to having that problem? And there might be different ways of getting there. You know, and then, of course, there's different potential solutions to that. And so, again, there's different paths. That's why it's, you should never just be satisfied with somebody else wrote about it. Somebody blogged about it. Like, there are people that are interested in your perspective, your story. Yeah. And I love to dig a hole. And while digging, just like you said, you're going to dig deeper and deeper. And while digging deeper, you stumble on another question. And you're going to look at another part of the puzzle to solve the question. Yeah. And that's fun, I get, I think. So what are your kind of passion topics right now? Like, what's the major news? What are you writing about, speaking about, doing things about in the community? Right now, it's all TPM related stuff. TPM at the station, which you need at autopilot pre-provision or self-deploying. And I'm working on a lot of stuff about the device health at the station because multiple people reach out to me complaining that the device wasn't compliant because of the BitLocker health at the station rules. And the device health at the station is like a big world of details and stuff. And nobody exactly knows how it exactly works, or maybe some, but it's hard to understand the whole flow behind it. So I dedicated some time of mine to take a look at what exactly happens when the device boots and also how to troubleshoot it. And I guess the troubleshooting part, I haven't seen it yet at the Microsoft documentation. So that's going to be fun. So much of community was built around the lack of documentation or poor documentation from Microsoft. So I'm not going to say that, but... I just said it. I mean, look, I started as a SharePoint MVP. So I mean, so much of the SharePoint community was because of the lack of documentation. Microsoft is improved greatly, but usually the sign of the lack of documentation is when you're going and searching for something, you're Googling and the answers are forums on Microsoft tech community or something, and there's no clear answers. There's an opportunity to go in to solve it, to write content because there's something. Now, of course, you can submit documentation. So much of Microsoft's excellent content that's out there that is all community-driven. So that's something if you can provide a solid blog post that walks through that technical solution, I always encourage people, like go back and look, I'm bad at it too, is going back to where I found those non-answers. Go back to the forums and say, hey, I wrote about this. Here's how I solved this. What I do? Right. Yeah, sometimes it's, yeah, there's a lot of follow-up, but it's great when you follow through on that, but yeah. Yeah, just like the autopilot documentation, the known issues. One issue wasn't documented at all, and I was talking to the product owner of Product Manager of Autopilot about something I noticed that was breaking apart in a few months ago. So I wrote a whole blog with all the details, why breaks, and not only that it breaks, but the reason behind it. And it was so full of details. So I sent her an email. I was like, this is how it is, and it's missing in the documentation. So I would love to see it appear in the documentation, and like a week after someone sent me a PM on Twitter, hey, Rudy, I guess somebody just added some documentation or a known issue to the autopilot. I was like, oh, that sounds familiar, the autopilot market. I guess I wrote a whole blog, a big blog about that process. You just highlighted something else that's great. For people that are interested in getting more involved in community, potentially becoming an MVP around that, a lot of it is your level of visibility with the Microsoft product teams, the engineering teams, the support organizations, because they're able to, because you can only be nominated by a fellow MVP or a Microsoft employee. It used to be for a while, there was a window when you self-nominated, shut that down. Yeah, so, but that's a great way of getting noticed is by you find that gap in the documentation and reach out. And I mean, don't do it as a self-serving, like, hey, take a look at me, but more of, hey, I found this, I did an article on this, would love to get validation, because I think this is missing from the documentation. And Google help a lot of people who are stumbling on the same issue. And because it's added to the docs, maybe they find it more faster than they use Google. Yep, that's always the one exciting thing when you get acknowledgement from the, especially somebody that's very senior in the product team that's just like, hey, didn't think about that. That's a great piece of feedback, that's great information. And, but again, I mean, that is somebody who potentially might follow you, that you stay connected with, that may be a point of reference when, because they will reach out with nominations into the product team. Like, does anybody know this Rudy guy? It's like, oh yeah, interact with them. So people know me, that's for sure. Yeah. They know exactly who I am, because of also that, just like you said, that Winners.old lingering folder from some time ago, when you wiped your device and your Winners.old was full of the user folders and the data from your, yeah, boss in it. Yeah, that was me stumbling on that issue, describing that issue and talking to the product managers. Yeah, and especially one guy, I love that guy. And he was like, we can give you credit for that, but it, yeah, you have it correctly. And also to, I heard they will fix the issue in the next update and in the next update, they fixed that issue indeed. But the same way I was telling, how you could fix it on your own. So I was like, okay, that's my solution, that's my solution. Yeah, I know, almost same. Well, and there's another blog post talking about, hey, they've done an update and they did what with James and point back to your other blog post. And yeah, it's, no, hey, look, it's a, I'm a big fan of the community documentation and that interaction between the product teams and community. And it's, it's not enough to sit and complain that documentation's missing and or we see these problems with it, like provide the feedback, provide your workarounds. Talk to them and product team knows, right? Yeah. And if they don't know, they can't adjust it. And be positive, be constructive about that. Cause that's- Only complaining isn't going to help. Yeah. You need to come up with a solution or ideas how you are going to look at it and how it's cool to help other people and set of only complaining, it's, it isn't there. Well, I was always, you know, part of my management style, I was taught early on in a job is like, don't have a complaint unless you have a solution. Yeah. Yeah. So things can be ugly the way they are because there's not an option. If you have a better idea of doing it, then you have the right to complain about the way it works today. Otherwise, don't complain. Right. Yeah. Love that idea. Anyway, yeah. Well, Rudy, really appreciate getting to know you. For folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you? Every social media that exists, I guess, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Discord, you name it, the TechNet community, the learn forums, I guess I'm everywhere. So, but Twitter, that will be. Well, we'll have all your links, all your data within the blog posted on YouTube as well. So if you want to get in touch with Rudy, you know how to find him. Just follow along and the blog post out on Buck the Planet and follow the video. If you're listening to the podcast, you'll have the links as well. So, Rudy, really appreciate meeting you and hopefully see you at one of these events that are starting to happen again. Hope and show. Thanks for having me.