 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Denny. Hello. Hey Christian, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? So I am Denny Cherry. I am based out of San Diego, California. I started as a database administrator back in the day. So I'm the enemy of basically everybody in IT. And I've gone on from there and I obviously do a bunch of database stuff still, but I've also been doing a ton of migrations up to the cloud, either AWS, GCP, or Azure, mostly Azure to be perfectly honest. I'm a Microsoft MVP both in data platform and in Microsoft Azure. So I've got a wide variety of knowledge and I spend an awful lot of time talking to people about this stuff. That was very cool. I run a small consulting company. There are nine of us total, seven consultants, five MVPs. And that's Denny Cherry. Well, what are those other two doing? Are they just slacking off or what? Well, one of them is new. He's been in IT for about a year and a half. Okay. So he's got a valid reason. The other guy, yeah, he's been too busy working. So he hasn't been able to focus on the community stuff. Yeah, it certainly changed things around for a lot of people. Like I was doing that monogany. We're talking about that interview. So one of one of his team members as well. We're talking about this international events as events are starting to come back online and more popping up. I was traveling. I was doing, you know, one or two events a month for years. It was like that. And just to go to nothing and just you just had to kind of change it up. I was writing more, creating more videos, just doing more virtual stuff like everybody. It went immediately from a lot of stuff to, oh, what are we all going to do? Because we're all just kind of stuck at home at this point. And I'm worried about this new variant that's come out. Well, a couple of weeks ago that that's running around the UK right now. Like that may cause a lot of headaches as well. Yeah. Yeah. I've got international travel scheduled this fall. So, you know, thinking about that as well, but same. I've got a trip to Italy scheduled for November. So I'm not worried about that as well. Yeah. Well, it hopefully the, the, the inconvenience will, it won't be more than having to wear a mask on the flight over that. It doesn't shut things down again. But yeah. Well, so, so I know it's been, you've been an MVP for what 15, 16 years now. Long time. What was, so I always like to ask, like what was your journey to becoming an MVP? I know it was, how different was it 15 years ago, trying to become an MVP from what you see in the community now? Well, I mean, there are a lot less. In person events to start with. So I, I became an MVP through a lot of presenting in conferences. So, but there were a lot less conferences back in the day. So I'm from the sequel server world, early starts where I started from. So pre-pandemic, we'd have things like sequel Saturdays, which would literally be every single weekend. Oh yeah. Even the weekend, like between Christmas and New Year's would typically have one who would just be in another part of the world. That isn't shit. Christian. Right. So like doing conferences was relatively easy. We're four years ago. 15 years ago, that was not the case. So I did my local code camps. I'm in Southern California. So basically we have four years. Three of three code camps a year at the time. One at San Diego, one in Orange County and one Los Angeles. So basically the bang with banged out. And so those would be every three or four months. So that gave me a decent introduction to speaking and, and seeing folks in the community and stuff like that. And then after that is just basically, you went straight from there. Kind of said the, the big national international conferences. So the, the stepping stones of. All right. I actually want to get in front of an audience and getting in front of the audience of 20 local people. Didn't give the happen. It was regional events, national events. And that was it. And then I was doing some stuff online and some of the forums. And then I was doing some stuff online. And then I was doing some stuff online. And then I was doing some stuff online and some of the forms. But even there, there were a lot less. I mean, 15 years ago, there was no stack overflow. Yep. Which is where 95% of IT people can be found. So you have to find the forms that you want to talk on and, and, and talk on them and get well known, relatively well known on them. If you get the attention of somebody at the MVP program to add you. Well, that's that what I always tell you, you get those questions a lot. I'm sure you hear from people too kind of, you know, what, what's that path? And, you know, like I, I'm mentoring people that are asking that question. And one of the, I said, look, there's no set path that can be different. There's different people that are covered with different things. But one of the easiest, lowest barriers of entry. Is going to, as you said, stack overflow. Out on the Microsoft tech community. Places where people are asking questions. And share your answers. Or, you know, or, or even just. Even if all you're doing is commenting on an adding to where people have already answered questions. And a seconding, you know, saying, Hey, I've tried the same thing. Yes. This is what works. For me. But, or connecting people like, Hey, this person over here might be able to answer doing something like that. There are plenty of people that started their MVP. You know, Paths by doing that. Oh, yeah. Most definitely. I mean, one of the things I, I know that that has frustrated a lot of people that are trying to become an MVP. Is the one that they'll ask, well, What do I need to do to beat MVP? And the problem there is, well, there is no set list. Like. It's, it's a bell curve. So, you know, you're, you're. Effectively going against a, the people that are currently in BPs, as well as all the other people that are not currently on BPs. And where do you, you know, You know, the people at the top of the bell curve, those ones that get the award. So it, it, it can get frustrating. I'm sure right now. I know a game that kind of, you know, I've played the game back, back before I was an MVP. And yeah, I mean, it can certainly be frustrating to have to deal with this to try to figure out what to do. If you want to really want to become an MVP. I mean, I mean, it can certainly be frustrating to have to deal with this to try to figure out what to do. If you want to really want to become an MVP. Yeah, that's, I was, I just simply described it as a black box. Yeah. It really is. And, and depending on the area, the focus area, the technology area, because Microsoft even, I wouldn't say lower the bar, but there are certainly areas where they say, you know, we need, we need to have more community people. We need to have more MVPs. And so we're going to expand the net. And to that we can build up in certain areas. And then of course, you know, as you said, it's the part of the competition is people who are MVPs. We're looking every year at the renewal process and Microsoft has, they've been talking about it for a couple of years, but it seems like they're finally starting to tighten the belt a little bit around that to make sure that the MVPs that are in there that it's not just a rubber stamp for a renewal, that they're actually contributing, continuing to contribute to. Yeah. I think that's something that a lot of people think happens is that MVPs are just rubber stamp to be back at the burger man next year. And like, that's not the case. Like I, a couple of years ago, there were a couple of sequels of R&B fees that listed nothing in their MVP profile. And I assume they were expecting to just get renewed. And they got me very different email on July 1st saying, you are no longer an MVP. You didn't tell us anything. Right. So as far as we know, you did nothing. So bye. Yeah, it's, well, that's why it's, again, when I talk to people that are interested in the path, I say, well, it's not so much about trying to become an MVP, but if you're already contributing to the community, if you're already doing things, things that you would do regardless of the award or not, are you surfacing that? Is it visible to the right, are the right people seeing it? That can sometimes be the hardest part. Yeah, you do want to look that because I, we've all known there's MVPs or I fought for who were just very, they were quietly in the background doing tons of stuff, but just not bringing attention to themselves. They're supporting the community, supporting events, supporting other speakers and events. You know, and so it's kind of how much, what do you do to ring your own bell? You'll not look like a complete ass out there self promoter. Like I jokingly, I have on my blog, when I promote stuff that I'm doing, I have a tag called blatant self promotion. So, you know, where I'm just like, look, I just want to get the word out that I'm doing this, but it's like, look, I realized that it, it's not a great look to be like, you know, hey, hey, take a look. Yeah, you're going to find that happy balance between self, crazy self promotion and looking like a jerk because of it. And, you know, not doing anything and not saying anything. You've got to find that, that balance to, to that, because if nobody knows you're doing stuff, I mean, that's fine. But you can't, you're not going to get rewarded for it. And which is the MVP award is an award. Yeah. So it's a Microsoft's way of saying, thank you for doing this stuff. So, so how do you overcome that? Like, what do you do? How do you do that, that self promotion? I have a very large mouth. And because of that, lots of people at Microsoft know me, whether they like to or not. And that helps a lot. So I, because of that, I've been able to, you know, I get the ear of people and internally, as an MVP, there's lots of distribution lists that we can be on with various members of the product group. There are various product groups. So I'm on a dozen of those. So I talk to those people on a fairly regular basis. And I talk to my MVP to get on a fairly regular basis. You know, I also speak at large conferences. So that helps just people to know me and know who I am and know what I do. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that, that is the thing. If you, if you have, you build up a following to a blog, to, to YouTube channel, to TikTok channel, whatever it is, where you're creating content, you're going to naturally get some of that, that visibility. Yeah. Any recommendations for somebody that doesn't have the visibility? How do you start that? I'm the worst person after that, just because I didn't be so long that I've forgotten how to do a lot of that stuff. Just because I, I'm friends with 80 people on the product team. So I have questions I can just ask them. And that gives that, that makes me visible to the people in the MVP program because of that. But that's a great example of that. I think it's a great recommendations to say that, no matter where you are in the world, you know, who are your closest Microsoft personnel? Find out who they are. Like I got where, where I am, it's actually just a sales office here. And so there's a, there's a bunch of people. I think there's 80 or 100 Microsoft employees that live in the area, but it's all sales. It's, you know, people that they don't, they don't do anything in Utah or not a whole lot. They don't, they don't go into the office every day kind of thing. Yeah. But still knowing who they are and invite them to stuff or offer to help with different things, but you'll get to know them. That's a place to start. Yeah, definitely. And if you're not in the US, a lot of people outside of US get to search because Microsoft is a US company. So they assume they need to know people in the US at corporate to become an MVP or to work in the community programs. And that's not necessarily the case. So for everybody outside the US, every country has a Microsoft office and they've got a local Microsoft subsidiary. And they're the ones that nominate and manage the MVPs in that local country. So you don't necessarily have to worry about the folks in Redmond. If you're not in the US. Yeah. Or then Redmond is, you know, the, a lot of the folks that you're going to deal with are going to be here or going to be up there. But yeah, if you're outside of the US, know your local people at your local subset. That's going to be the key to, to get a good, that insight and that access to Microsoft. Another great way to find out is, is if there is an event where there are Microsoft speakers that are in the topic, the area that you focus on. So they may not be from your country, but if they're in that region, they may be the spokesperson for power platform, for example, and doing a lot of different events. And, and usually the Microsoft people that are actively speaking at these different events and conferences, they're a bit more social and connected. And so they're going to be more apt to connect with you and, and somebody could develop a relationship as well. Yeah, that's fine. Well, very cool. So, so what kind of topics like, what are you writing about talking about right now? What are the, what are your hot topics? Hot topics recently. Southwest Airlines and their technical debt screw up. Where they basically shut themselves down for a couple of days because they couldn't get pilots on airplanes. I wrote about that for you to magazine. I wrote for, I wrote a couple of things under conditional access and as your active directory back before it was renamed like a month ago. So I need to write new articles with the new names. Yeah. So I'm like, cool, great. Everything's been rebranded. Awesome. I can sell all new articles with basically the same content. Awesome. Just fixing all the names. So those are kind of the big things I've written recently. Yeah, I'm looking at your most recent techie gurus stuff. Top five reasons companies should move workloads to the cloud. Yeah. It's always a popular more of a business topic. I asked. Yeah. So pass or SAS, which platform is the prex solution for a workload? Yeah, I've been writing a lot on Azure specifically recently, just because a lot of our customers are either in Azure or moving towards Azure. And so they have lots of questions. So when the, when they bring up questions, I'll typically write an article about it for somebody and post it out there. I've taken the last few weeks off as I had shoulder surgery a few weeks ago. Oh, I'm fun. I just got the sling off like two days ago. Yeah. So once, once that's done recovering, I'll probably go back to writing, writing a couple of articles and sending some stuff back out. But yeah, that's, that's pretty much just been the stuff that people want is what I try to write about. My writing process is always, I never know what to write about. If you, if somebody gives me a topic, have it right now. It's the coming up with topics that I am awful at. Well, that's something too. And this is kind of a word of advice for anybody. If you're, if you've written for other sources or if you're interested in, if you go to talk to CMS wire or techie gurus or I'm sure your editor at Inc. And say, it's like, you know, they've got their one, they're, they're kind of their editorial focus, usually a monthly or quarterly basis, but they usually are pretty good at tracking. Like what are the keywords? Like what are people searching for over content that we don't have, that they're not finding and give you suggestions. So people just need to ask. So that's something of course there are tools that are out there that you can go and do that kind of research on your own as well. I mean, you can go do Google keyword analysis and find suggestions. Yeah. What I always like, what I love doing is it's funny. Bing doesn't do it. Google does it. But much better job of it, but is so you enter in your search for whatever topic you're interested in writing about. And you see like other questions that people are asking about that topic. If you, you find the most relevant ones open and close them. And what it does is it adds to that list of other questions people are asking. You can then go search on those questions for content. Yeah. So here this is the editor in me that is, you know, has these suggestions because I do get that question a lot. Like, well, what are you looking for in that? It's just, you know, like, like there's constantly new projects that are out there. You can just go do and do any Bing Google search on tech news and see all like the announcements for the month from the variety of different companies, things and, and get ideas for articles on that. But yeah. One other thing I just added to get my final, then I'll, I'll step off the editor soapbox, but is love it when there's cross product integration stuff where when you talk about like the business application of something, there's one thing to go in there and say, let me describe what, you know, this Azure, what, what is Azure? And, and right about that kind of thing. No, but if you go in and talk about like here, I'm, you know, migrating a customer from Amazon to Azure in this, in this specific example, and then walk through that people love that real world experience. Yeah. Look at, you know, maybe a mix of different technologies. Then not necessarily the nuts and bolts and details of the article, because those are going to apply to seven people. Right. What I think a lot of people like to read or at least what I like to read is something more mid level, not, not super high level, not super in depth, but that mid level of this is all the stuff we had to pick up and move from point A to point B. And this is the rough idea of how we got from point A to point B. And then throw some business stuff in there about how much money we save and that keeps the, that keeps the CFO happy. Right. No, that's a, that's why the majority of content, the most popular content is, is I'd say kind of like 60, 40, 200 level, 300 level. So you got like solution architects or somebody that's knowledgeable about the topic, but that has a business focus, gets out of the technology. And then you get into more of 300 level, which is like the administrative and it's scripting and how, you know, here's how you fine tune this thing to get there. So it's not just going to point out of the box, but here's the things that you've taken into consideration as you're doing a deployment that more on the admin side of that. Yeah. People just love that kind of content. Yeah. Yeah. The 400 level where you go in down to the code and you're going to build something like right there. Like, Hey, that's great for engineers and, you know, that, that side of things, but you're going to lose the vast majority of the audience there. Yeah. No, yeah. I've presented at conferences where they, they tell the speakers when they're submitting, we only want 400 to 500 level content. No, you don't. You want to say that you'd have, you want that, but what you want is 200 to 300 level content because that's what we'll sell. Yeah. So if you're running a conference, your job is to sell seats to sell, sell tickets. So, you know, it's great to say all our content 400. And I'm happy to do a 500 level topic on indexes. It will be useful to absolutely nobody. Yeah. Because it's not real world stuff, but then that's the, that's the stuff where after you're done with your 300 level topic where you're going through the architectural level of that. Yeah. Some detail there. And then people come up and ask those questions. You get the three people that come up at the end and asked for those granular engineering discussion, you know, questions. Yeah. And that's, that's when as the marketing guy, and that's what I say, let me introduce you to this Steve from my engineering team. Yeah, exactly. Well, cool stuff. Well, so anything else going on community wise, you know, anything that you're involved in coming up here soon. So I know the past summit live 360 and ignite are all happening in November or conveniently the exact same week. Where's the past happening. The same week as a night. It didn't know where, where is it happening? So convention center. Same building. Well, that's convenient. Right. So one of them is on one side of Pike Street. The other ones on the other side. Okay. I don't know which is on which side. But yeah, that's, that's how they're splitting it up this year. Yeah, so they're both in the same place. I will not be at any of those conferences for the first time in 12 or 13 years now. I will be on a cruise ship from Italy to get to Florida. We booked a cruise two years ago and it happens to be the exact same time as past. Of course. Of course. And there will be other some major life event happening when MVP summit, when they finally announced the dates on that. Yeah, it's just, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think. I don't know when that is. Yeah, they've not announced it yet. No, it's all my international MVP friends are fuming. There's like, you know, I'm like, I'm booking travel already for events. Like I'm already submitting abstracts for conferences. And we don't know when these events are going to be like Microsoft needs to get back on the ball and announce this stuff early. They're really, really bad about announcing dates, especially things like MVP summit that aren't customer based and that you don't have the right tickets to and that sort of thing. Well, they're waiting too long and ignite, build and inspire as well. We don't find out details until like 30, 40 days in advance. It's just crazy. So inspire for the last five or 60 years has been easy to figure out. Look at when to see comic con in San Diego is it's the same week. Oh, okay. All right. It was extremely convenient for me as I go to comic con. Yeah. So I've gone to one inspire event. I think I was left first one or first or second one after it was rebranded. Yeah. But after that, it's been the same week as comic con. I'm like, yeah, I'm going to that instead of inspire. Yeah. Well, that's so ignite it with that overlap. Like I'll be at, I'll be at life 360 in Orlando. So that's just another event happening that same week. So yeah, three of them the same week. Like I've, I've thought about how to do passing life through 60. Cause they've been the same week for a couple of years now. Yeah. But unfortunately the Seattle tour Orlando track is really hard. Yeah. There's a number of there's some nonstop flights, but you know, November summer. And so there are new nonstop. So basically it's a red eye. It's not a red eye. It's a layover. Probably with a red eye, which is really hard to do. And yeah, the, it just basically sucks. Yeah. No. Hey, I know I, so I'm in Salt Lake. So I mean, go going East that time to get to Florida. It's hard to do. So I'm going to be going through probably Dallas or Houston or Atlanta. Yeah. To get down there. So yeah, I can't, can't avoid it. I was there for the hurricane last November in Florida. So. Yeah. It's a, I'm hoping to repeat that experience. Yeah. Hopefully. Can you hit there will be as mild as the one that came through San Diego. Yeah, there you go. I'm far enough on the coast that the entire hurricane went east of me. I know it caused a lot of problems. Yeah. Outly in the vampire. But my house, we got like some rain in a slight bit of wind. I don't think any of my chairs outside moved. Yeah. Hey, we saw some rain out of that system as well. So it was big enough that it reached this far. East of California as well. So. Yeah. So I know my sales guys up in. Marietta, California up in the, in the empire. And he said he got drenched. They were closing roads. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are flooding out. I'm like, yeah, dude. We got, we got, we got like some rain. Everybody always laughs about that Los Angeles river, which is that little stream that's down in there. And it's like, well, that's, there's a reason why they built that system the way they did. It was for that. That, that lot of the El Nino storm system like this. It's there's a reason it's like 20 feet wide and like 15 feet deep. It usually has nothing in it, but, you know, people and cars for movies. Yep. But when it, when they need to put water in it, it can hold a lot of water and it can move a lot of water. And yeah, it's there for a reason. I mean, it's, it keeps L a county from flooding. Yep. Well, hey, Denny. So close things out. If people want to reach out, connect with you. What are the best places to find you? Where are you most active and social? Well, this is where to find me. It's our website. www.dcac.com. You can find me on Twitter. Blue sky, master on Mr. Denny. Companies got Twitter. On Twitter were DCAC CO. Massadon blue sky. You can find us at DCAC. And so we're trying to stay active pretty much everywhere. There's just a lot of social media to look at right now. Yeah, there are. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time. And we'll make sure we'll have the links, of course, for everything out on the blog. It'll be out on YouTube and on the podcast as well. So you can find all the links there. And, and it's great to maybe I'll see it. One of these, maybe the latter half this year. I don't know. I'm going to be going to like six or seven more this year. So maybe we'll cross paths. Let's say hopefully we will. If not, that's always going to make sure it's for. Yep. Hey, we'll talk to you soon.