 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Kevin. Hello. Hey everyone. How you doing? So, Kevin, for folks that don't know you, you've been around for a bit, but for folks that don't know you in this space, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? I don't think my gray's coming in that well on the camera. Yeah. Yeah. So, I got the same issue. I get the haircut like this. You can't tell like it's all gray right around the edges and. But, so, yeah, my name's Kevin Griffin. I'm a developer technologies MVP and have been for 14 years now. I've lost count at this point. And developer technologies basically is just the, it's where all the people go that they don't have a better place to put us. They're like, they want to. It's the bucket. It's the bucket. I mean, now they shortened ours to just an M365 MVP and they moved emerged a couple pieces in there. So, it's, we've become a bucket for kind of everything. I was, I was originally a SharePoint MVP. And then there were teams and Yammer MVPs and Excel and PowerPoint and kind of all those and that's all now just one. Yep. So, I do that MVP stuff. I'm independent consultants, primarily working with a client right now called Shows on Sale doing a lot of their program lead stuff, managing a small team there. And I do some courses. I have a podcast called the Multithread Income Podcast where we talk about doing basically using your dev skills to, you know, bring in other forms of income than just your normal W2 job. It's a great topic. Yeah. I love talking to people about that stuff because there's so many possibilities. Yeah. People are, I just, where we are, funny in the US, folks that are outside the country, like I just heard the numbers yesterday, we're at 3.7 unemployment. What that doesn't, I mean, there's so many hidden numbers within that, but it's not as healthy as it appears all the time. Yeah. Some people are working multiple jobs, crazy hours have been all those kinds of things. It's, and then of course inflation on top of that. So just, just what a great time to be alive, you know, and working. That was one of the reasons for the podcast was we were noticing that a lot of our friends in the tech industry are losing their jobs. You go into work one day and you think you have a fairly stable job, fairly stable tech job. And then if budgets don't align correctly, management says, I'm sorry, we gotta let you go. And folks are just without anything to do. They just start the job search all over again. And what we try to push is a little bit of insurance, why don't you start some other threads of income using your tech skills, your dev skills, your IT admin skills, whatever skills you might have, and, you know, just have something. So if you lost your job because like, oh, speed bump, no big deal. I'll just go work on this other thing a little bit more. Yeah. So that's, look, that's, you know, I've been, I've worked with a number of like my current, you know, company that I worked with, Rencore, but have, you know, still do stuff independently and, you know, so have had that, the side career for many years now and have done some fantastic projects and it's, there's always something going on, but there's something to be said about having multiple irons in the fire. Yeah. And I'm as, you know, as a former startup guy, I mean, it just makes sense. Yeah. Just had this conversation of like, like some irons are hotter than others and require attention and others put off for some time and then heat up suddenly. And so it's always great to have the flexibility to be able to do that. Now one, it's great to have a W2, a full-time job. Yep. To be working that. Great. But yeah, we are, we're moving to a weird place where you can't rely on companies. I don't need to be so dark and pessimistic. I'm not. Yeah. But just remember people, you need to invest in yourself because your company doesn't care about you as much as you would think they would care about you. It's, you're probably around the same age as me, but when we were growing up, it was like our, our dad's philosophy of, you go work for a company, you do your 20 years, you retire, you go work for another company for 20 years, you retire and the company just takes care of you. And I remember getting out of college or university and I was three months into my first job working for some Antec. Like I thought I made it big, like I hit a big company. I was working on security software. It was great. Once in, it got laid off with like half the building I was in. So I had this mentality. Oh, there's no such thing as job security anymore. So if I want job security, I got to create job security. Right. And that's just getting out, talking to people, learning as much as I can, teaching as much as I know. And a lot of stuff I don't know either. I still teach, but just, you know, making a, making a face, making a name. So if I ever found myself in the weird situation where I needed work, you know, people already know who I am and I can, you know, trust in my network a little bit. That's actually pretty common amongst MVPs is that, you know, we're, we're very career-minded people like we're building our career, building our own profile around that. And smart companies know how to leverage, you know, when they hire MVPs. I mean, there are, there are some MVPs that have very unsupportive companies. Yep. And there's, they don't respect, you know, like the value of having somebody that's plugged in the network. And there are some MVPs who have lost their MVP status because their companies really try to curb extracurricular activities. And so much of what we do, you know, for the community is it's, it's, again, it's, it's on our time. It's in our evenings, it's on our weekends. We're using vacation days to go and attend conferences and activities, taking time off unpaid to go attend the MVP summit this year, for example, or next year. But yeah, it's a, well, what was your, so you've been in this over a while. What was your path to becoming an MVP? When, all right, so let's go back 14 years. I was working for a consultancy that was primarily government contracts, a little bit of commercial contracts. And I had come into that job after getting laid off from Symantec and I was in this new mode of, I just need to learn, I need to learn things. I need to expand my network. And I discovered my first user group, which was the Richmond.net users group form from a long, long time ago. They're not around anymore. But that was the closest to me. And I live in the Norfolk, Virginia Beach area of Virginia. And actually, I think that's where I met your Christian was a SharePoint Saturday, Virginia Beach, Virginia Beach. That's right. Long time ago. Has there been a, was it their one in, was there one in Richmond ever? I think they did. I think I volunteered first or second year there. Yeah. I did like user group stuff. I mean, you know, there as well, but I think Virginia Beach, which is what, like an hour, hour and a half, hour and a half to three hours, depending on traffic traffic. Yeah. Yeah. So I found this user group and I was learning.net at work, making the drive up to Richmond every month. The, the meat of the user group got to know a bunch of people eventually started doing code camps when that was the thing 14 years ago. And really, you know, just trying to meet people and someone said, Hey, you should get into speaking. And I'm like, ah, that's not my thing. But I did a talk and I really love doing it. I did more of it over and over again and just tried to become, I tried to become a facet in the minimalistic developer community. So if you were in Virginia, Maryland, DC, all the way up to Philadelphia, you probably knew who I was because I was trying to be at every major event that they were running. And that was great because I was married, no kids. I had just a little bit of, I had work responsibilities, but I took PTO for all the big things I did. And they were usually on Saturdays. So I drive up a night before, do the event, come home on Sunday. And I did that just religiously. And back then you could do that sort of work and people would put your name into MVP leads and say, Hey, you should really take a look at this person or that person. And at one point, I think there were probably 15 people vouching for me to different MVP leads. And to the point where they can't ignore you and you get an email saying, Hey, you've been accepted as a Microsoft MVP. And that first acceptance is the hardest. After that, you just kind of, you got to maintain pace. You can't give up. You can't stop what you're doing, but you don't have to try as hard as you were trying for that first initial MVP. And yeah, the rest has been history. I do a lot of public speaking. I do a lot of conferences. I don't blog or YouTube or anything like that. But I try to be visible in the community and that helps a ton. You'll see, that's again, I love like that you brought that point up. Like you don't blog, you don't YouTube stuff. You like that, like there is no. It's a black box to us, so to say. It's like, but there's no fixed list of you must do these things. It's a different combination. There I always say that there are, I know a couple of MPPs that all they do is forum stuff. Yeah, public speaking, they don't create YouTube videos, any video content. That's not what they do. They've contributed. They've co-authored a couple of books, both of them. But their primary contribution is in the forums. And they're just one of those names that you go in there. If you have a question about one of them, SharePoint. I always joke that this person is like me talking about him. But this person who, in fact, I don't think he's an MVP anymore because of the nature of his work. But he's one of those people that when SharePoint product team, people, engineering had questions about SharePoint, they would reach out to this MVP. Yeah. So a lot of his work and he's a been a long time contractor at Microsoft, which is why he's not an MVP anymore. But anyway, it's it's again, there's all different. So depending on your comfort level, it's all about giving back to the community. Yeah. You know, the hard part is always for some people that are more on the introvert side of things is that you have to befriend, get to know an MVP or Microsoft people because they're the only two audiences who can submit your name. Yeah. There was a window for a while and you can submit your own name. That is gone. They're and I'm the person who knows the MVPs. And I know very few people on the product teams. And to the point where they probably have heard my name or they've seen something I've written, but I don't think there's anyone on our product team that knows, yep, Kevin, they would point me out in a crowd. They would come up and talk to me at a conference. I just don't have that relationship with the product teams. Most of them have that relationship. They cycle, they move through into different roles and they're gone in two, three years anyway. But yeah. A lot of my good friends that were MVPs a long time ago, eventually go work for Microsoft. Right. I know those folks. So, but anyone who's just been product team for forever, I really don't have a standing relationship with them. And there are some MVPs that just abuse, I want to say abuse. Like they abuse their relationship with the product team. Like they just, they try to eek it out as they name drop. They do all that stuff. I'm not, I'm not that person, but there are some who do that. Yeah. I, we won't, we won't name names, but some that do. And there are others that have, and look, this is certainly true. We all do this is that there are, you know, some that have connections and personal connections in with the team. And so they have those ongoing relationships. And like you, I have many friends that were MVPs. Yeah. They're now at Microsoft. And I try to not abuse that relationship, that connection. The other thing that happens though, with people that go to work for, for Microsoft, as much as they say that they'd like to stay with connected in the community, a lot of them disappear into the blue, the deep blue. You just get so busy and tied up and all the different things going on. It's hard. Right. So that, that again, it's understandable. But it's not yet part of their job description to be in the community. Some of them, yes, there. But so what are your, the look going back to kind of your, your topics like what you focus on, what are, what are the latest topics? What are the things that are your most interested in, you know, new releases, announcements, anything like that? Well, my bread and butter is.net, C sharp, all that good stuff. I poke my head into the Azure space a lot too. Not enough to be an Azure MVP, but I like to dabble back and forth in those and specifically building business systems. And I'm, I'm going to say this out loud. I don't like the flashy new stuff. Like the, we see a lot of things coming down the line. We just had the.net, a.net April lease month or so ago. And there's a lot of new flashy stuff. And I think it's all interesting. It's all worth talking about, but I don't talk about it because I don't think a lot of the businesses I'm working with are adopting that yet. They're, they're just kind of in a wait and see mode. And they're more interested in trying true what's, what's going to live the, the lifetime of their business systems. And we've seen this is not just a Microsoft thing. We've seen it, you know, across the entire industry, you know, things that pop up, they seem super exciting. And then they die six months later. We never hear from them again. And I think those of us who have made the mistake of going after the flashing new stuff and then having it pulled away from us. Last minute are a little bit more reserved. In the long run. So I do, yeah, I like talking about.net. I like talking about Azure. And I like to look at what are normal, small, medium-sized businesses doing with those technologies. So very little that I talk about is ever going to be in a ignite keynote or a build keynote. I'm doing all the other stuff that there's like a side session for. Um, so the primary climate I'm working for right now is in the ticket brokerage industry, and we're, we're doing some fun, exciting stuff, but we're not doing anything flashy that you would ever see in the keynote. We look at that and go, yep, that sounds great. Doesn't apply to us and move on to the boring stuff. Yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a great point. I mean, I used to, again, when I early on, especially, and I used to say this all the time is that, you know, a lot, a lot of people, a lot of MVPs, a lot of speakers want to go and talk about the new, flashy, latest, exciting stuff. They want to be the first one out there to talk about something else. And yet you go into the sessions that are kind of the meat and potatoes topics and they're packed. They're standing room only. Like I, I, I started out again as a SharePoint MVP, you know, before I was at MVP for years, I was all about information architecture, metadata management and governance. Those are, that's, that's it. I came up through the ranks. That was my, my world. I, you know, I started as a, you know, as a business analyst, moved into technical project management. And I found like these were issues that I talked about and worked with clients prior to joining the Microsoft ecosystem. So when I was back, back in previous roles, and, and so you get in these sessions that are just packed and people asking questions. So we're all, it's, it's hard. We're all, we're technologists. We're excited by the new stuff. But part of why I think the value that MVPs bring is we talk about real world examples of deployments and of strengths of hits and misses of the technology, the gaps and how do you fill the gaps? Yeah, exactly. I work with a good number of small businesses and they're, I'll send it on the call and someone will bring up a buzzword and let's use an example. Like, well, do we need, do we need Kubernetes for this? Do we need Docker for this? And do we need to, you know, containerize all of our stuff? And I'm like, you have a web app that talks to a database. Like you don't need any of this crap. And what you need is the $90 app service on Azure. And you need the $90 SQL server database and you're done. Like that's all you need. You, you have a hundred customers. Let's come back and talk when you're serving millions, if not billions of customers every year, and you need like Domino's pizza scale on Super Bowl Sunday. Like let's talk about big architecture problems when you have big architecture problems, but everyone's into the keywords in the, I'm sorry, the buzzwords and what they see in the keynotes. And we, we don't have those problems. Like a lot of, a lot of businesses don't have those problems. They have, they have app service and a database problems and maybe something else in between. You don't just maybe think I would love to talk to the IT team that manages Domino's about their capacity management on Super Bowl weekend. It was a case study back in the early Azure days. And I'm trying, I have to look to see how far back it was, but it pretty sure was Domino's was used as a case study where they talked about their scalability issues, um, leading up to Super Bowl Sunday, which makes a ton of sense every other day out of the entire year outside of maybe like Christmas Eve, Domino's doesn't need like a full data center worth of servers to process their orders and manage their orders. But on Super Bowl Sunday, they easily do a hundred times the traffic that they do for the rest of the year. So if you were going the normal data center route, it doesn't make sense just having servers and servers and servers on standby in the case that you have a flux in traffic. Moving to Azure makes a ton of sense because it's just what moving the box from two instances, the, you know, a thousand instances and paying that one hit for a day for the compute that you need and then scaling it back down when they're all done. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, it was a case study because they were one of the early partners, they were in the keynote where they talked about Domino's and everyone was like, Oh, that makes a ton of sense. But that's also when Azure did like three things. And right now it does everything. Yeah, but having that, so many businesses that have that, you know, that elasticity issue, they want to be able to scale up, pay for what they consume and drop back down around that. I was thinking one other area and again, I know it's networking. It's not your, your area, but like, I would love to talk to the IT team for like a major conference where Wi-Fi served everyone well on day one and not day three when they finally figured it out. Um, you know, what, why do they always so underperform? They run our IP addresses because no one, no understands sub, uh, sub net masking and all that good stuff. So they only have like 300 IP addresses and then as soon as a group of developers walk in or a group of IT admins walk in and they have three devices all connected in the Wi-Fi. Yeah, you can take down the network and no problem. Yep. Well, now too, it's, uh, people that are, uh, sitting in events that are hybrid and they get an earpiece in and they're sitting in a session streaming another session that they were conflicted on. I mean, that there's, that is happening more and more often as well. Yeah. Stories to be told. I've had, I've run conferences where we, we've, we've told the IT team at the conference center, like we're going to take down the internet. Let's, let's just prepare for that now. And they're like, no, no, no, no, we're fine. I'm like, no, I promise you we're going to take down. We promise our internet would be fine on day one. No problem. I said, can you put that in the contract? And they go, whoa, no, we don't, we don't promise it that much. And what happens first hour of the conference, everyone's crashing. And it's always because we run our IP addresses. You can have gigabit fiber and but IP addresses, you always run our IP address. So something that we are, this is something we've talked about with our collab days, Utah event. It's one of the, one of the benefits of running it at the community college. Cause we're, we're there, they are built for, so we're able to use as part of our contract, use the student Wi-Fi that's there. So I don't know how many tens of thousands of students they have at the campus where we're at, our 300 people are not going to max it out. And so that's just not an issue we've had to worry about. But thank goodness. Again, that's something that was in our planning. We actually discussed that that was for selecting other venues. One of the reasons why we stayed where we, where we are. But anyway, I digress, but well, those, well, Kevin, for folks that want to reach out and connect with you, like, where are you most social? So if you're not blogging, you're not YouTubeing. Like, where do they find your stuff? Well, I have a blog. I just, I'm regular. I updated once a year, like a, like a good developer. Um, so that's consultwithgriff.com. Uh, mostly on Twitter and LinkedIn on these days. So on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it. I'm a one KevGryff, um, that's number one KevGryff. And LinkedIn just search for Kevin Griffin and, you know, MVP. And I'm probably pop up first. But those are mostly the places I hang out, um, most of the time. Well, okay. Well, I'll have the links, of course, out on the blog and out on the YouTube and on the podcast. You'll be able to find that anywhere. So Kevin, really appreciate your time. Hopefully, I know there's not, not as many events as there were, you know, a decade ago to travel back and forth. Like, I've not been to Boston in years. I've not been to the Carolinas in years, um, just that it haven't been the events to kind of pull me out. But I think everyone got burned out during the COVID times. It was a good excuse to shut everything down. Well, like our event that's happening in April, we're doing in person only. We're not even doing hybrid. That's how you should do it. We're going to serve the only way these things can bounce back. The local community, the people that show up, that's who we're there for. So yeah, it's just too much angst. Time to try to also do a, a hybrid event. So, but really appreciate your, this is the big argument. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm going to digress some more on it. Yeah, you don't get the interactions the same way you do, right? Virtually in person or whatever. So I love the virtual events. I think it was good for us when COVID started and we needed to keep going. So we didn't lose connection with each other to do virtual events. But the real friendships that I have made over my career have been from in-person events and you remember someone more when you're face to face with them and you're seeing them up on a stage or you're in the hallway track. You just can't do that with virtual events, not in the same way. And which is not to say we're not saying don't do a podcast, don't do a live stream, don't do a webinar. Like those are all still valid. Those are fantastic, you know, do lots of those things. But I think you're right. We need to get back to the roots of the core of why are we doing it? It's for those face to face, face interactions. As a presenter, I mean, that's what I love most about doing events, too. When I've got, like I just did something that had about 100 people that were on there, just under 100 people, like two questions from 100 people for an hour long. Like they were checking email. They were doing other things at the same time. Whatever stuff they're doing versus, you know, in somebody sitting in my session and they're sitting there, obviously doing email. I can go stand in front of them and, you know, what are you doing? Call them out. Yeah. Yeah, part of the fun of being a speaker is embarrassing the people that come to your session by calling them out. But well, Kevin, really appreciate your time. Great connecting again. Hopefully you get back out your way. And I'm trying to get out there in February to D.C. So we'll see if it happens. Oh, good luck. Yeah. Well, thanks for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.