 Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Chicago. Hello. Hello. Nice. Thanks for having me Christian. Thank you guys to have you. And for folks that don't know who you are. Who are you where are you and what do you do. Yeah, so everybody my name is Thiago to study you. I'm originally from Brazil, Sao Paulo, Brazil actually, but I've been living in US almost three years. I already lived one year in New Zealand. And yeah, well what we're in New Zealand in Auckland. I love New Zealand. I would move there. But amazing country. Yeah, it is amazing. I spent a lot of time I've explored I think I've explored more of the South Island than North Island but yeah. I'd like to spend more time over there but we had to return my wife was missing her family and we had to return. Which is why we're not going either what once you you've got kids and I'm getting grandkids. You can't move that across the other side of the planet. It's harder. Yeah, maybe it will be a retirement plan for those. Yep. Well, so and what do you do so where do you work and what do you do. Oh yeah, so. Yeah, so I've been working with dot net since 2004. And I worked with several different projects since then, several different technologies I even work with SharePoint, we was chatting before the recording. Anyway, and it's pretty much what everybody has their shareport experience some sometime in their career. Yeah, exactly. And since 2013 or less I've been working with Azure and most of the projects have been working since then, somehow they are running on Azure. Yeah. It's pretty much what I decided to focus. We were kind of talking about, you know, there's so many different things that are within Azure like so what do you focus on within Azure because there. I work with so good friend that I do a number of community activities with Mike Nelson who's more of the infrastructure side of the Azure side and I even saying that that's a pretty broad statement. Yeah, yeah, what do you focus on. So, most of the projects I've been working they are web APIs or web based, and they are running on top of app services. And we are using other things like storage accounts, Cosmos DB or SQL database, as well as service bus for messaging and heavily using Azure functions and a lot, some key vault for secret management. I think those are the services that I've been working nowadays, but I already worked with data factory a few years ago. What else I work with event hubs as well for one project, but most of the time are those that I already described. Yeah. Interesting. I noticed you also have an MBA. That's kind of an odd thing for somebody that's on the computer science track so kind of what what what inspired you to go that direction. Yeah, that's a good thing you notice because MBA in Brazil it's something different. Oh, not like business side, but in my case, for example, I have an MBA in software engineering, basically, and we study, you know, quality attributes we studied design patterns in depth we studied this kind of things. And I'll keep curiously many years after I finished my MBA I was invited to teach that and I was teaching until I moved here to US so it was a nice thing. But I also have plans to start master degree, but it's, you know, something that's on my mind I don't know if it will work in the end. Let's see. If a company decided to pay for me I'll definitely do but from my pocket I don't think it will work again. I don't know. You know, I have the same thing like I almost started a doctoral program many many years ago. I ended up going. I was slated to start. I started working for Microsoft in 2006. I saved my start twice I lost my placement so I would have had to reapply all over again. And I just I got to the point kind of similar where I'm like weighing that mean the cost, and obviously the time the family commitment to go and do that. Yes, like I don't know that I will get any kind of financial benefit from from doing that. Yeah, yeah so it's. Which what you know honestly that's that's kind of a good thing for us. I mean feel like it's like if you figure you're that you're having success in your career. If it's not really going to add value you've got to be doing pretty good I mean usually the degree well for most people. Yeah, it's because you'll see an increase after that. I just don't think even having a PhD. I mean, maybe it'll be easier to get, you know, to write some books to get, you know, but I've already like you, I think you've written a couple books having you. Yeah, I have to. If you have that pattern. It's, it's actually easier to go and get to get pick up new projects in fact, I get calls all the time from various publishers like hey would you be interested in joining on this book I'm like, no. Yeah, so one thing I learned after this process of writing books is that you need to write a book that will last, otherwise there is a high chance before you end the writing process it's already outdated. Especially if you're focusing on Azure or things in the cloud that change all the time. What's especially within technology, it should be if you're going to spend that much time because it's a lot of work to prepare a book. It is, especially, honestly, I think it's harder to write it with co authors than just by yourself and you're driving that process but it's, it's best if you write about something that you're actually leveraging that. I mean, my first book, my co founder and I have a software company, we wrote it we are both consulting at the time so we incorporated our book into our consulting practices. So we go and teach classes or do consulting and the book sales was incorporated into the fees, you know it was built in because we would actually leverage our material like training material, or the courseware. And it just kind of worked out and to your point later books where we went and wrote things where it. Yeah, I see how now so many authors have moved to the digital format, so that they can constantly update it, and not worry about so much about you can still get the print copies of one version of that, but they're really just kind of an ongoing writing project. Exactly. But this happens in also other industries for example, we do have this problem with Microsoft documentation as well. Some things that are published and you're supposed to go there to find the latest implementation, it's, you know, stale. They have so many pages so many things to document that it's hard to follow the same pace as the engineering team that's constantly adding new features and delivering it. It is what it is we need to somehow live with that. Well, you just described like how I entered the technology space I started as a tech writer than as a business analyst. That was my job was updating all that documentation it was. An unforgiving job it was just constantly endless. Yeah, just ongoing. Well, that's yeah that it's a, like I said, for people that want to go out and write a lot of a lot of friends have written books and more power to them I know what's involved. I'm not, I know how little you get back out of it. There's, you know, one in a million that that does well in fact I was talking about how my, one of my favorite authors of all time is Orson Scott card sci fi he had been winning all these awards. He still had a full time regular job a day job and was writing that he won all these science fiction awards had these beloved books that were very successful, but was still a technical writer for Atari back in the early 80s. But he had that day job, and it took him a few years of success before he was able to actually make enough to be full time as a writer. It's, it requires a lot of discipline and commitment, like for example, every day I'll write one page or two or 10 whatever until it reach some, you know, point that he can send for review and start publishing. Yeah. Well, Chicago, what was your path to becoming MVP. That's a good question. And, you know, it's something that just happened back in the day. I think it was 2012 or 13. I was working for a small company and the partners and owners of this company, they were MVPs. So somehow I got involved with and they started to invite me to present in the same events that they were presenting. And at the same time, or a few years later, maybe 2014 or 2015 something like this. Microsoft was creating the first data center in Brazil. And we were working on a project for that particular data center. And I had the opportunity to be a beta tester and you know, I was interacting a lot with the engineers and they call me and we spent time together figuring out things and anyway, I think this blend of things somehow, you know, got the attention from the MVP lead and it is how I started the program, sorry. And since then I've been helping a lot of the community. I'm reaching almost 1 million users in the stack overflow that somehow they visualized my answers and replies. I only focus on Azure Tech. And besides that, I send emails directly to program managers on the services that I described earlier, like App Service, Azure Functions, we exchange a lot of emails. I provide feedback. Somehow they invited me to, like, what we are doing here at 30 minutes call and I share my screen to do some things, or they ask my feedback on a particular feature and most of the time it takes more than 30 minutes and we start chatting about other things. And yeah, I think they like these kind of things that I do. Even though I'm not super famous as MVP, I think I provide a good feedback for them and it is how I'm still in the program, I think. You know, that's always one of the hardest things where you need to have some level of visibility with Microsoft and, like, the MVP leads and people will ask, well, how do you do that? It's like, well, because it's not, hey, I need to go and become, you know, the social famous, that necessarily, hey, there's some people that do that that are recognized and have a lot of followers, they go and do that, that kind of recognition. But others are, like you said, it's, you know, that are just very active in the forums that are providing help that are involved with their regional level with the user group. Some people that get very involved with the MTCs and different events and so you kind of catch attention of Microsoft people that way. Maybe there's a number of ways that you can do that, that don't have you out there, you know, as the big name on this stage. Yeah, what I'd like to highlight is there's no formula, right? But if you probably already did this, but if you interview like 100 different MVPs, somehow, there's something that in common. It's passion for technology, passion for community, and impact. So, for example, as I said, I'm not super famous, but one feedback that I gave to the team and they implemented it will affect like thousands of users or even millions of users, right? So this is, you know, somehow it's important. So that's the thing I would like to say. So, for example, as I mentioned, my answer is on Stack Overflow, it's almost reaching one million users. There's another MVP that I know in New Zealand, a small country, New Zealand, he has like 30 million rich people with his answers, and he only focus on the identity part. You know what I mean? So, anyway, again, there is no formula, but somehow you need to, you know, find your own way and try to combine those elements that I described like passion for technology for community and somehow impact multiple people. That's what I would say. I know that that's the hardest thing. One of the things that you said was that I really like, and I advise anybody that has interest. And even if you have interest, I think humility is important too, where there's a lot of people you might have the goal, but to recognize that by participating by doing all these things by developing these healthy habits, there's a lot of benefits out of that, whether or not you ever become an MVP. Correct. You're going to get benefits from kind of shaping your, your, your work life, your technology life around these kind of principles. But one thing that you said about finding mentors as well is so important. Yes, exactly. It's that that is key because you do need to have a Microsoft person or an MVP current MVP submit your name now. Yeah. But it's good to have that advice to have that encouragement. Good point. But not only for that, for example, it is good to have mentor for your career, because it will save time. And sometimes you may think that something it's trending when it's not like, for example, I don't know some some product or technology that there's something else that we will replace, or even you, you, it will save your time for example. What one thing that we like, it's to attend and speak on conferences, because I'll be exposed to multiple different topics in one day, for example, or two days. And if I had to start by myself, all those topics, it will take way more than two days, you know what I mean. And after that, I, I will decide, Hey, who do I need to invest more time on it or no, and then I'll plan the next steps. That's a good tip that I would like to leave here for your audience. Yeah. I really appreciate this and Jago for your time and and great to meet you and hopefully one of these days will be back doing in person. You know, MVP summits and we'll get to meet up but for folks that want to find out more about you and follow you, what are the best ways to reach you in social. Yeah, Twitter or like LinkedIn both on at th.net. That's my alias and I had everybody just saying hi and that's it. I'll leave here and if you can put in the description that will be good. We'll do. Well, Chiago is great, great talking with you and have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for having me.