 This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. And I'm talking today with Brandon. Hello, Christian. Thanks so much for having me today. It's great to have you. It's it's always it's great to talk to somebody from my home base, my former home base of Northern California. So you know, these SoCal people like what's up with them? What are they like, good weather or something? Whatever. Yeah. So yeah, so for all of California's like Northern California had had sort of like had two and a half seasons, you know, it's like super hot, super cold, and it was windy and rainy in between. But for folks that don't know you, who are you? Where are you? And what do you do? Yeah, thank you. So my name is Brandon Minnick. I recently just became a Microsoft MVP for the first time. We were chatting a little thank you. We were chatting a little bit before the show and Christian asked me, he's like, yeah, but you were you were Xamarin MVP before we were working on this like now I used to work at Xamarin. So I never got to be a Xamarin MVP because I was an employee and then Microsoft acquired Xamarin and I worked at Microsoft for seven years, six years, depending how you include my tenure at Xamarin. So was never able to be a Microsoft MVP and yeah, about actually almost exactly a year ago jumped over to AWS and I work as a dotnet developer advocate there and basically trying to make AWS better for us.net C sharp developers. So working on improving SDKs and docs and giving talks and showing how you can do things and making samples. And that's kind of what I've been doing for the last seven, eight years. Anyways, because I was also developer advocate on the Azure developer advocacy team also promoting dotnet and Xamarin and now down at Maui. So, so yeah, I do a ton of C sharp stuff. I do a ton with the community. I lead the dotnet Maui community toolkit team actually helped create that back when Donate Maui was first getting stood up back when I still worked at Microsoft and continue to lead the team now. So yeah, love speaking at conferences, sharing, sharing stories, sharing knowledge, blog posts, videos. I've got a couple of videos coming out this week on the AWS toolkit and how we can use it to make our C sharp code easily run on AWS. So it's it's been a lot of fun. I love this journey and it's very humbling to finally get the the word is that we call the MVP award. Yeah, I see. The word is glass is crystal or something. It's nice. Yeah, it's not a piece of plastic. Yeah. So I was going to ask you kind of, you know, what is it like being the like basically the Microsoft tech guy at AWS? But and I don't know if people out there watching you don't know this. I mean, there's a lot of former Microsoft people that are that moved over to Amazon and that kind of, you know, kind of reached the pinnacle of their career, what they could do to grow. And I mean, it's kind of still the sad state and tech that often you have to leave a company and you know, to be able to move up and to grow in your career. But there's a lot. It was easy for a lot of Microsoft people based up in the Seattle area just to go from Redmond to Seattle and switch companies. But so but but how is that experience? Well, there's there's literally dozens of us. So I'm not alone, but we're we're certainly a minority. You know, we have we have a couple monthly bi-weekly meetings where kind of all of us dot net folk get together and just catch up and talk about, you know, where are some of the pain points with something we can work on? But yeah, it's it's really interesting because I worked for Azure for so many years and it Azure is a very easy on ramp for dynamic developers. You know, everything's baked into Visual Studio. It's also it's owned by Microsoft, which also creates C sharp and net. So it's it's kind of a no brainer. And when I came over to AWS, I I literally get questions now from people that say, wait, you can use dot net on AWS like, yeah, actually AWS is supported dot net for longer than Azure has, but that's that's kind of where we're starting. And so that's the rapport in the community, the dot net community around AWS is so abstract that a lot of folks don't even know you can use it. And that's kind of where we're starting from. So this past year has been a lot of me just just showing up just getting the word out that like, hey, you can you have another option if you if you want it, if you need it and also going through that new user experience because I know the cloud really well like the cloud as an abstract term, but learning AWS as a C sharp developer wasn't the most pleasant experience when I joined and arguably still isn't great. We can always do better. So yeah, finding those rough edges and the onboarding experience and the docs like a lot of AWS docs focus on Python and JavaScript, which is great. And that's their majority of their customers use those languages, but yeah, there's millions of C sharp developers out there and it just explaining to folks like, hey, just including a C sharp example here, which we already have. So it's not any extra work. Just include that example and it's like we're being more inclusive and it's not this kind of slap in the face to me as a C sharp developer where I'm like, I really need to do this with S3. How do I do it? I look at the docs and it's like, well, here's an example and Python and like, great, that doesn't help me. And so, you know, as a AWS employee, somebody who's been using C sharp and cloud for gosh, almost a decade now to struggle with that says something and it says we can we can improve a lot. So whereas there's a lot of there's a lot of improvement going on internally. We we are certainly the minority in the company, but you know, it's it's nice seeing this this openness, the sharing, you know, it's not us against them. It's we can all work together. It's not this, you know, finite slice of the pie that we're all chasing after, you know, there's always going to be more developers and you know, if we just improve developer experiences everywhere, then that'll force everybody else to get better. So I kind of also see, you know, just by us making AWS a better platform for C sharp developers, it'll hopefully push Azure to be a better developer platform for C sharp developers and likewise as they get better and push us, we'll we'll respond accordingly. So in the end, the developer community wins. We all benefit. And so it's but it's been really exciting. I've really enjoyed my time here. Co-workers have been great. The team here is great. And like you said, a lot of former Microsoft employees also came over around the same time. So I've had a really nice support group and folks to lean on and even little things like like, hey, he said he said app sync. What is that? And they're like, Oh, well, you know, there's this in Azure. It's kind of like this. It's like, Oh, okay, got it. And you can kind of help translate that, that new company culture into there's something that's funny. Be having been in, you know, tech for over 30 years. I mean, back being my career, you run across companies that be like, Hey, we are, we are only a Microsoft shop or we are only a whatever technology shop. Like you don't really find that anymore. There's always a mix of different cloud providers. I mean, multi-cloud is a major thing. And there's so many different solutions out there. More and more companies are embracing the, like there's reasons for, you know, one vendor might be stronger in certain industries and certain solutions to help us with this that we're building out. I mean, I don't remember the exact stat. I remember hearing a few years back that there were even, there were more SharePoint instances. I'm started as a SharePoint MVP hosted in an AWS. Then there was on Azure. Of course, Azure being newer too. I don't know what those stats are now, but you know, again, there's just, there's a lot out there. People will go based on price, based on the capability of the functionality that they need. Yeah. And yeah, my coworker, uh, uh, Francois, he and I host the dotnet on EWS show together, which we've just released that as a podcast, by the way. So anybody listening, check out the dotnet on AWS show and your podcast app. But, uh, yeah, he came up with a great line that I love and it's called. He, he says that AWS gives developers a choice. So if, if the only platform we could use was Azure, which is great. Again, I used it for a long, long time. Um, but if that's the only platform, well, there's nothing pushing it to improve and get better. Whereas, like we were saying earlier, if, if we keep iterating here at AWS, then we can push each other and we can come out with new things or better SDKs or improvements that we'll see. Sprinkle out everywhere in the community as one of us institutes it. Yeah. And so, yeah, I love that line with just, you know, it gives developers a choice. Well, it's, it's the whole, the friendly co-op petition, yes. That's an actual, the word that's used, but it's why you see Microsoft at, you know, at Amazon events, you see Amazon at Microsoft events, sponsoring there as a, as a partner doing things. So it's, yeah, it is. It's, it's about what are the customers need and to end. Uh, it, it makes me think of how different Satya Nadella style was to bomber and I, I was at Microsoft to be bombers. So I was there at the changing of the, you know, of the guard. It was there the, the final days of a bomber and so a lot of the open source stuff, um, a lot of the partner stuff, like it just opened up as soon as bomber was gone. We know how he felt about a lot of that stuff. You know, you know, do what is necessary quotes. Words have been said. Yes. Um, but I just remember when Satya gave his first keynote, it was a, it was at the partner conference, which is renamed to inspire now. And he said something to the effect of, you know, we, we want to create the best solution software out there, but where we don't have the best solution or we don't have any solution, we want to partner because it's about the end to end user experience paraphrase that, but that's what he, that is what he said. Yeah. And that was just a breath of fresh air. It's, uh, to, to focus on what the developers needs are not on, you know, let's push what we're selling. I agree. Well, so what are your kind of passionate topics? What are you speaking on? What are you writing about now? What, and what are your main outputs? Like where is the podcast? Yeah. So, so still heavily, uh, passionate and heavily involved in Donut Maui. Like I mentioned earlier, we have the Donut Maui community toolkit. So if you are a Donut Maui developer, you'll probably want to add this to your app. It's the most popular Donut Maui, uh, library and, uh, been working with the team, uh, the Maui team engineering team to try and get it added into the templates because we have so much in our toolkit that probably should be in the Donut Maui library, uh, that they're leveraging us more and more, which is, is great. So, um, yeah, talk a ton about, uh, Donut Maui. I have a couple apps in the app stores that I've created in both creating them in Xamarin. I still need to port them over to Donut Maui. So love, love mobile, love C sharp. Um, and I have a couple. Let's say passion interests where, uh, a couple of years ago I had some weird bugs in my app found out it was an async await thing because I didn't know how async await really worked. Like I knew how to write the code. Like I had a little async keyword. I had the await keyword boom, boom, boom, done. Um, but then when weird stuff started happening my app, I dove a little deeper and found all this compiler generated code. And so that became a huge passion project to mine. I've, uh, still travel the world giving a talk called async await best practices. I have a new get package. Also called async await best practices that recently, uh, just cleared 1.1 million downloads. So it's, it's definitely something that I think we all struggle with, uh, so love async await. Um, and have also been doing a lot of talks on GraphQL, uh, that's another area that I found in the .NET community where millions of developers are using GraphQL. Um, and it's, I don't want to speak for other communities, but one of, if not the most popular choice for, uh, folks like JavaScript developers or React developers or Python developers. And for whatever reason, it hasn't really broke through into the C sharp. Um, there's a word I'm blanking on, but, uh, you know, like that state of mind where when we're creating an API, uh, we'll still default to rest, which not a problem. I still make rest APIs myself. Um, but GraphQL has all these benefits and we have actually the best libraries in the world. Uh, there's a company called chili cream. That makes these GraphQL libraries. So if you ever heard of shop, uh, hot chocolate for your server code or create your GraphQL server or strawberry shake for your GraphQL on the client side, they're, they're literally the best. Um, the guy that makes them, Michael Stabe, he is one of those crazy really low level C sharp guys that loves to do like pointers and spans and bite arrays. So his code is just hyper optimized and he's written a better GraphQL client that's more performant than HTTP client. Um, the code he writes is all auto generated for us. So if you're using a GraphQL back end on the client side, it'll fetch that schema and generate all your C sharp, like what we would call models or DTOs. Like those are all written for us. So, um, so not only do we have the best libraries, um, but they're also the most performant in terms of performance and memory management. So we're really spoiled in the C sharp world. Uh, but for some reason GraphQL still hasn't really, um, become kind of part of the paradigm yet. So I've been talking about it for years hoping somebody will pick it up and catch on. But I don't know, man. Maybe, maybe Microsoft just needs to purchase chili cream and bring in its libraries and yeah. Well, they've got great as a marketing guy. I mean, that's great product names for that. Yeah, I don't know about SEO though, but if you type, cause you just search hot chocolate, right? Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you'd have to have some modifier on there. If it was like hot chocolate, you know, Excel or something is, is one. And SEO would, yeah. Plus, but a plus in the end of everything else. Well, that's very cool. Well, so, uh, so what kind of, so again, the, the types of output, like what are your, what are your, um, community contributions look like? Is it a lot of, a lot of writing more speaking? Yeah. So lately it's been a ton of open source. So lots of, um, open source projects, releases between, like we mentioned, Xamarin or Xamarin community, also worked on the Xamarin community toolkit, but the Don and Maui community toolkit, async, way best practices, uh, tons of travel. So, um, been trying to show up at a lot of conferences to get the word out that yeah, you can use.net on AWS. So I'll be in Europe for three weeks in October going to, uh, Tecarama, Netherlands, go into NDC Porto in Portugal and sweet hug and Gothenburg, Sweden. Um, and I do have a blog. Uh, code traveler.io is my blog, although it has been very neglected by me, uh, for the last year or so, I haven't, um, had a good blog post entry in a while, but a lot of that is just being busy with on ramping and a new community. Um, and, uh, having to focus in other places, but one of these days we'll get blog posts cranking out again on code traveler.io. Well, I talked to a lot of people and mentor people that are interested in becoming MVPs. I always talked about this. There's no set list of like you must blog this many times. You might like you, you're in a role and your company is supportive of you traveling around and doing the community stuff. Um, I mean, that's, that's, uh, uh, it's, it's great when you're able to get that, you know, past companies that I was the chief of angels. And so I was at events around the world, speaking on these different topics that I was passionate about. It was great to have those, those jobs. And then, you know, a couple acquisitions, acquisitions later, you know, that the company's no longer there. Um, but yeah, it's, uh, there's no one way of, of. Kind of contributing to the community. And so it's just always interesting to see like, where's more of the focus on the writing on the speaking on the, as you said, you know, contributing actually to like GitHub and other sources so that people can go and see the solutions that you're building, you know, Yeah. Yeah. I think the key is, you know, a help people, um, I get questions all the time, like, how do I get more people to my blog or like, how do I get more Twitter followers? And to me, those are always the wrong questions. The, the actual question you should be asking is how can I help developers? Because if you make good content, people will find you, uh, you know, it's going to take a while. Yeah. I, I've been doing this for a long time. It's not like you pop up one day and go, Hey, I'm here. I wrote a blog post, give me 10,000 Twitter followers or whatever your goal might be. But yeah, if you just make helpful content and do, do what you enjoy. So, you know, if you enjoy writing, write blog posts. If you like making videos, make videos. If you like speaking at conferences, speaking at conferences, but yeah, there's certainly no one way of doing it, doing things like you said and all of those mediums help the community because sometimes I just want to copy paste code from blog post. Sometimes I want to dive deep into how the compiler handles async await code and I can spend an hour watching a video on that. Uh, but, uh, all of that helps the community and by doing it, people will notice and people will start, um, following you. And that's how I see is the best, most organic way to rise up in the MVB community. Yep. No, that's, yeah, it's well said. That's the, it's a, hey, content is king. What the kind of content you go create is completely up to you. Find the thing that it's the right fit. So I always tell people develop the healthy habits, whatever it is. If it's for some folks, it's, uh, dialing into the, uh, the, uh, tech community site and answering questions, do it for 10, 15 minutes every morning, just make a habit of that and you'll start building a following there and, um, assuming that you're actually answering questions and helping people, but, uh, well, Brandon, so really appreciate your time and, uh, and meeting you for folks that want to get in touch with you, reach out. So where are you most active in social? Yeah, and thanks again for having me. If you, if you want to follow on, join the conversation, uh, find me on Twitter or X at the code traveler. And that's really the best place to reach me. You know, I, I'm really bad at answering emails and even Slack messages. I'm looking, I've got four unread Slack messages just right now. So, uh, but yeah, if you, if you message me on Twitter or tag me on Twitter or DM me on Twitter, I'll, I'll see that right away. I'm probably a little addicted, but that's okay. It's, it's tech Twitter for the most part is a good place to be. I'm still very active on there. So well, Brandon, really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.