 This is Christian Buckley doing another Microsoft MVP buzz chat interview. And I'm here today with Martin. Good morning. Good afternoon. Yeah. Good afternoon for me. I'm in the UK. All I do work in US hours. My team are in the US. So why don't you give us that background, who you are, where you are, what you do in your company, all that good stuff. Yeah. So yeah. So as you were saying, I'm Martin. I actually work for a managed service provider who are headquartered in the US. They have a presence in Europe as well, called Insono. They work across the full stack of technologies, all the way up from mainframe, doing managed mainframe, private cloud, and then all the way into public cloud. And I sit in the public cloud team, for me specifically on Microsoft Azure and DevOps. They're my main focus areas. And yeah, I work, or the team I work with is based in the US. I'm in the US Consultancy Group. So yeah, my hours are kind of odd, I guess, for anyone that is in the UK. But I basically work early afternoon till late evening. In this era though, we're all working from home and online. That's not so weird anymore. We're all working whatever hours we're working continuously. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's basically me. So yeah, the key areas for me, from a technical perspective, Azure as a cloud technology, although as an organization, we actually do AWS as well. So we sit across both of the major players within there and provide managed services around all of those things that I just talked about. But yeah, my primary areas are actually from a technology perspective. And then the very broad and large subject that is DevOps. Well, and I know you just became an MVP. So congratulations for that. Yeah, thank you. So it was a few days before this. So yeah, that's right. Yes. Yeah, new, new brand new. Sorry. So yeah, it's been something that I've been, I would say working towards, because I don't think you really work towards an MVP. It's a recognition for the work you do outside of your day job, right? The key thing about becoming an MVP is it's all about community work. And I think as well as it being a lot of hard work, for you to actually get to the point where you can be, someone can feel like they can nominate you for an MVP. I think it takes the work after that as well to not only get the nod from Microsoft to say, yes, this guy or girl is absolutely worth giving an MVP to. But then you've obviously got to maintain it because you were re-selected every year, basically. So it basically goes to recognize the outstanding contributions that you make to the community. So whether that's speaking engagements, blogging, podcasts, so videos. So basically giving back to the community. But it's stuff that you do on top of your day job. So it's not a recognition by Microsoft for how good you are doing as your VR customers or your clients or whatever it is. It's basically that above and beyond stuff that you do. And I think, yes, the work is primarily on me to do, but I want to do that stuff based on the, quite frankly, amazing community that I have the pleasure of working with. And whether that's people that organize user groups. This is actually a good opportunity for me to say thank you to those people who actually want me to speak at their events because without them agreeing for me to speak at those events. And be able to share my knowledge and experience and those kind of things. And then wanting to be able to write blog posts that I know are popular with people and the people that read the blog, the people that have listened and subscribed to the DevOps podcast that I do. Without those people, those are the people that really drive all of the MPPs within the program. Because without people wanting to lay off technical experts and wanting to share that knowledge, and the program really doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned. So it's a really key thing to have in it. It's an absolute privilege and an honor to be included in that still fairly elite group of people and be looked up to someone who is a community leader. So yeah, it's a great privilege to be recognized by Microsoft. Well, I think that's going to be a constant thing that you'll hear from MPPs as well. It's like we'd all do the things that we do regardless of being an MVP. I mean, there's a lot of other benefits. So let's be honest. There are great career benefits to also participating in the community. Again, regardless of MVP status, just getting involved and making connections and helping other people. It's fantastic. So most of us would do what we're doing regardless of that status. As a new MVP, you're going to start fielding these questions. People will come to you and say, well, if I want to become an MVP, well, how do I go and do that? And I think the bigger story is more of looking back at the career of most MPPs. Very few, and I'm not saying it doesn't happen, who are just kind of doing their job and they're doing a little bit, they feel just a little bit in the community and then they kind of, somebody nominates them just because of the help they've provided and they're completely unaware of that. But usually you go back and look at the career trajectory of the individuals, the path that they're on, how they got involved and that speaks so much more to why they've become MPPs. And so you kind of mentioned in the beginning, you've been in tech your entire career. Straight out of university and just kind of went into tech. Kind of, what was your path? How did you get started and lead you to where you are today? Yeah, so I mean career-wise, I actually started off while I was at college in the UK, so UK college. So that's from when you're 16 onwards before university. I actually didn't go to university at all. So I have no degree or diploma, as you might say, from the US perspective. So in a lot of ways, I did it the hard way, but what that did do was give it the ability to, I guess get a head start on others my own age in a lot of ways because while they're leading at university and college, I'm getting practical, real-world experience. And throughout my career, I've been a hiring manager and I will always want to speak to, if I have two people side by side that both look great on paper, I am always going to want to speak to the person that has more career experience because there's going to be less uplift for them to get to the level you want them to be within your organization. So college diplomas and degrees are very important for a lot of roles, but you can still get to where you want to be without doing that. So if you're someone watching this on the fence is to, if you're in the UK and you don't know whether you want to go to university or not, or if you're in the US and you're just the kind of person that's not going to excel at that kind of academic career path, then I could definitely attest from experience that that is not the be-all and end-all of your career. You can still put hardware in and get to where you want to be. I consider myself quite lucky that I was able to be on a senior leadership team within the organization. I mean, now, by the time I was fit, it's a great place to be. Some might argue that there's very few places for you to go after that, but I was still a technical senior leader at the end of the day. I was going to say that there's plenty of place for you to go. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's like in the tech world, there are those opportunities where I would argue that the, I mean, if your career vision is to go up through the executive, the leadership side of things, there are going to be fewer opportunities if you don't have the pedigree for that. It's just a reality, whether that's right or wrong for organizations, I think that way based on, instead based on experience. But within technology itself, it's pretty leveled out based on skill and value derived, as though there are those opportunities. It's, I have my oldest, I've got four children, my daughter who's married and she's just got into her first tech job out of, she finished her master's and she was a STEM kid. So it was a science kid and is in the healthcare industry and where she looked at the various job opportunities after finishing a fellowship after graduate school and saw this job that was in technology. So now she's like, Dad, where's the best place for me to learn about Power BI and the power platform? I'm like, yeah, I can help you child. I can't, she would, she used to send me her papers of like, Dad, can you take a look at those paper? And I'd read half of this where it's talking about different cells. I'm like, I can't pronounce half these words. I can't help. Like, but this I can help with. She said, just like, Dad, these jobs, there's so much more money than the other, in academia and the other jobs. I'm like, yeah. And she's, so she's really excited by that. But I think that's true, career wise. There's so many different opportunities in different industries and different spaces. You can have a passion for healthcare. You can have a passion for other non-technical topics in industries, but then find tech roles within that, to be within the industry and find great opportunity. Definitely. And one of my passions outside of technology is aviation. I'm absolutely, since I've been a child, in the absence of ever becoming a pilot, because it's frankly too expensive to become a commercial pilot. But in the absence of that ever happening, I've always been fascinated with aviation. I actually worked for an airline for a while, just before the pandemic and left there for the opportunity I'm at now. But that was great for me. Not only was it a great place to work from a culture perspective and all of those great things that make a great company, but for me, I was like a kid in a sweet shop again. I got to be around planes, I got to be around other people that understood the same kind of stuff that I decided to learn outside of technology in the aviation world. And I think one of the pinnacles of my time there was getting to spend three or four days outside here for an airport in London. One of the biggest international airports in the world and one of the busiest international airports in the world. I had the privilege of standing feet away from a front wheel of an Airbus A350 or a Boeing Dreamliner. And I have plenty of pictures on my phone to attest for it. They come out at parties to say, look what I did. This is me stood next to an engine. This is me in a cockpit. And you weren't just running out on the tarmac with people with guns pointing at you. I was actually allowed to do that. You were authorized. I had to bank in everything. I was actually allowed to do that. Wow. And it was pretty good because what I was doing, so I went on a tour with our cargo operations team while I worked there. And they had a paper sheet that they used to track the movements of what cargo was due on, when and at what time and what time it needed to be dispatched up and certain documents needed signing. And the day without it was just about a year ago, actually, it was November last year that I did this. And it was raining, obviously. Being in the UK, it was raining, goes without saying. And this piece of paper was obviously getting wet. They come right on it. But what a lot of people probably don't know is that within an airline, a lot of the car work around getting a plane into the sky is actually not done by the airline. It's done by various different partners. So the cargo company that were responsible for loading the aircraft were a Fed party of who I went for. So they, you know, us as an airline, we had no way of using those sheets of paper to say, how was this Fed party, how were they performing compared to what they expected them to do? So I took that sheet of paper back with me. I scribbled some notes on from the operations team there. And I made it into a simple app that they could record the times in electronically and then report on. So I got to go back subsequently, airside, you know, on the tarmac on the apron. Again, I was authorized to be there, thankfully. And we got to test it on an iPad. So, you know, the company used iPads. So there I am. We're testing it. We're making sure it works and we can see what we need to. All of that great stuff. Made some tweaks and, you know, off it went. So, you know, it was really, it was really good working in tech to be able to apply my technical experience to a real business problem. And when it comes to stuff within technology, I think that's one of the real passions I have within my field is applying this, you know, huge amount of technology and services that's available in Microsoft Azure to real-world business problems. And I'm quite thankful that I have that blend of being able to understand the business problem and understand the technology that can fix it. And the automation, you need to get something to work and such like. So, you know, quite often I'm the guy in the meeting that's got the notepad out where someone says a problem that they have. And, you know, I'm the one there thinking, well, if we did this, did this, and did that, that would probably work. And, you know, I never want to take that kind of thing for granted because that's, you know, one of the elements of everyone's individual secret source that ends up making you successful and everyone has that different element that gets them to where they need to be. And if you want to work at something, then, you know, whether it's your ability to afford favoritication, whether it's your ability to get into a certain role, find out the way to get to where you want to. And that's, say, exactly what I've been looking enough to have the opportunity to do and then get to where I am. So, yeah, very, very privileged. You know, it's interesting. So you're working the DevOps space and you've just kind of touched on something that, so I talk a lot. I'm a, I don't know if you know, W. Edwards Deming, so Deming, like, you know, just-in-time manufacturing and productivity guy, but he would talk about, I can actually hear his voice from his videos, of, you know, optimize this system, this craggly old guy. But is this idea that you are constantly looking for, you solve problems, you're in there in an operations mode, well, then you're going and looking, okay, what is looking at all the data? What's the next area of improvement where we know that, you know, something needs to be done? So, one of the, I have a background in technical project management, kind of where I started my career, and, you know, I would constantly, I'd own all the front-end applications for different systems, and they'd say, well, go in and demo these things, and I remember having a conversation working for a consulting company in Sacramento, California, where they wanted me to go and test out some new software, but they didn't want me to test it on any productions, problems, and areas, because they were production systems. And I remember, I said, well, we can go and do these generic tests. I said, but, you know, we're not really going to see the value, we're really going to understand the solution here. And I just remember when they said, ah, I spent weeks on this, and they made a decision not to go with it, and then they didn't solve the actual business problems, because they were fearful of applying the new technology and testing it on the live system. And kind of what you talked about is understanding what are those real-world problems that we're having, and go in trying to solve those real-world problems makes a big difference. But that's a big part of modern DevOps, is, you know, you're like, everything is running fine, but where can we improve if something, if there's not a break fix that we're looking at, to go get that next to move, we're at 75% efficiency, how do we move it to 80% efficiency and start looking at those different activities? And so it is a constant iterative experimentation. Yeah, we actually, I think at the minute, we actually have some really good examples, you know, unfortunately, it's a global pandemic that's made the situation come about. But, you know, I think, I honestly think technology of all the industries out of the pandemic, and, you know, technology is still doing really, really well. You only have to look at some of the earnings reports recently from the, you know, some of the larger companies that are continuing to make money, and, you know, which is good, you know, someone will always make money in any scenario, you know, we shouldn't put a downer on people for that happening, but the organizations that have these DevOps methodologies and ways of working and best practices ingrained within them, that are in technology at the minute, they're the ones that are coming out at this really well, I think, at the minute. You know, you only have to look at, you know, some of the providers of conferencing software, right, all of a sudden overnight, whether it's WebEx, Zoom, Teams, you know, still Skype for some people, whatever platform it is, the engineering teams and the operations teams that support these platforms, all of a sudden overnight had to cope with hundreds of millions of extra people using their tools and platforms. And a lot of the things that's instilled within us, within DevOps around more collaborative work in better communication and an agile approach to delivering your work and dealing with the technical debt that comes up and those sorts of things really means that those organizations are in a pretty good place when it comes to being able to deal with that demand. And there are other organizations which, you know, you can tell just from what you see and what you hear, some of the problems are with those platforms that they don't do this. You know, I'm not going to name names, but there are some platforms that have not coped well with a rising demand and there are others, you know, specifically thinking about Cisco with their suite of conferencing products, Zoom, Microsoft and Slack and, you know, a number of others. They've all done really, really well. You know, there's been very few outer keys or no outer keys for those providers. They've rolled out updates, still they're providing new functionality, all while sometimes in some cases seeing their user base increase by, you know, at least a hundred percent, literally over in the space of days. So that's really a testament to what value a good implementation of DevOps can bring to your organization. And that's really technologically agnostic. You know, I'm a technologist and I love engineering still. But from a DevOps perspective, it is really not about the technology. It's around the culture of your organization, the people that you have within that organization and the processes that you have in place. All the technology really does is just start to automate those great processes that you already have. And it's that technology on top of there, which then starts to, you know, really start seeing more value again on top of what you've already done because now where instead of running that process, you know, it might be a really lean process from a human perspective. But as soon as you automate that process, we can now run it 10 times an hour, instead of twice an hour. And that's where the value starts to increase, again, on top of that. And it's really clear to see, like I said, when you look at a lot of the organizations today and how they've reacted to the pandemic and how they're able to scale massively, you can tell that they have a good story to tell around all of the call principles, demos. Yep. Well, every time I see like a jump and you'll release some new features and I look at the jump in user numbers around some of the services that you mentioned, having lived in this world for most of my career as well. And I know that there's a lot of people that are not getting sleep during those spikes. Yeah. Activity. But yeah, there's, to talk about opportunity within this space around all of these real-time services, tremendous opportunities for individual growth, career growth within those segments as well. Well, Martin, I really appreciate your time talking today and getting some of the history here. People want to find out more about you, get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you, social platforms that you use? Yeah. So I'm a pretty big Twitter user, so you can find me on Twitter. The handle is MrCoups. So that's M-R-C-O-U-P-S. And I also post obviously fairly frequently on my blog as well. And my blog is m12d.com. And then also I do a podcast as well. And the podcast is called DevOp Squad. And it should probably be no surprise that that podcast is all around DevOps. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So feel free to check that out on the usual channels where you get your podcasts from. It's on all good providers. So yeah. Those are the three main ways. And one of the things I would add on to that is, if there's something that you think, oh, I really wish I knew how to do, or it'd be really good if I could speak to someone about this or I could see a blog post on how to do this I wish I could talk to someone about this particular subject and feel free to reach out. This is all what the community is about at the end of the day. And I know I speak for everyone in the MVP program, in Microsoft MVP program. And they would all say the same. They would say, if you need help with something, reach out to us. It's free, extremely powerful letters, but we're all still human. We're all still people. And helping people is what we love to do. So don't be afraid to reach out to anyone and ask for assistance. If it's just a chat that you need and you want to do that on Twitter, then that's fine. I see people interacting with MVPs daily. By all means, do that if you want to speak to someone. Again, just reach out. People will be absolutely more than happy to help. Right. And if we, in a common thread as well, because you're well said, is that if we don't know the answer, we definitely know somebody who does know the answer. And so we point you to somebody, you know. And so that is, that's a great point. So don't be shy. Reach out to the MVP community. Absolutely. Well, thanks a lot for your time and have a great rest of your afternoon. Yeah, thanks, Christian. You too.