 Hey, everybody. This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Luke. Hello. Hello. Good morning. It's it's it's good to see you, my old friend. We go way back way back as of last week. Oh, yeah, I know. Yeah, that's we'll see. That's what you get from failing to hit record is, you know, like, I know so much about you already. I feel like, you know, yeah, hey, I've got I have long term like online professional relationships with people where I've only seen their Twitter profile big. So the fact that we've actually talked, I know it's a bit. Yeah. And the thing is, it's kind of like we've had Microsoft build in between our talks. So oh, yeah, even even a week, a lot changes in the technology world. So we should get into that as well. But for folks that don't know who you are, who are you? Where are you? What do you do? So my name is Luke Murray. I'm a technical consultant at in Hamilton, New Zealand. So my role is essentially pre-sale. So technical pre-sale solution architecture, taking business requirements for small, medium businesses around the Hamilton, White Caddo area of the North Island. Estimating projects to move them to the cloud, Microsoft, Azure, modernize and look at, you know, some of their cost optimization and operational processes to make things better. Well, and you also like always like to point it out every time I talk to someone in New Zealand, you live in one of my favorite places in the world. Folks, if you've not visited New Zealand, I mean, I'm I'm a total Lord of the Rings nerd anyway. But in fact, I was in Wellington the day before they the Weta workshop announced that they were doing the Hobbit movies and the day stuff. So I was actually in there the day prior. And there was a lot of activity going on. And we tried, Buddy and mine and I tried to kind of sneak around the gate, if you bid down there, it's pretty secure. And they were starting on some projects for what turned out to be the Hobbit. And so that's why security was Yeah, of the normal. But yeah, it's pretty, pretty awesome to go down there and see what they've done and some of the models. And definitely a place you could spend a lot of money at. Yes. Yes. But it's a no, it's a beautiful country. I've actually I did the Tonga Rero crossing with Buddy and mine. So that's actually two mountains, the two volcanoes that were used for parts of it for filming the Mount Doom scenes and things. I think where the initial battle was kind of the precursor with Elrond and such going on and fighting against the Sauron at the beginning, the opening scenes. You have a time machine. You've probably seen more of New Zealand than I have. Well, I actually, when I was my first time driving on the other side of the road, too, I was alone down the South Island. Yeah. And I was driving along and I'm looking around. Again, this is how much of a nerd I am, though. And I'm driving along and I go an area like this just looks like Rohan. It just looks like it. Yeah. And and so I kind of pulled off and was eating some lunch or something. And it's why I remember this so distinctly, but I was looking up on my phone and they actually had the the road marker of where it was. Like where I thought it looked like Rohan was where they filmed actually where I'm right there and that was cool. Why I remember that so distinctively is because it was at that point that I then entered the highway on the incorrect side of the highway. I was doing the old American thing. Yeah. And almost hit somebody. Scared me to death and I did not make that mistake the rest of the trip. Yeah, we've had the opposite. Well, the same experience, but in the states because yeah. I think I told you last week, but for the audience, I've been to the states a couple of times. I actually got married in Vegas. And the first trip that we did to the states was. L.A. for three days, then New York, because that's always been a dream of mine. So ended up at New York on my birthday. This was, you know, five or so years ago. And then back to L.A. again for for a couple of days. But we we ubered, took shuttles, got flights the first time around. But the second time around, which was three, you know, three years ago, really good timing before the pandemic hit. We went to the states and that's when we got married in the October of, you know, that year, but we made the decision to get a rental car. So we flew in. Got a show to the rental car place. All good. And they just so there was three of us. They're so myself, my wife and stepson and. Up, you know, some some luggage, but they decided to upgrade us to like a seven Cedar, bigness and you definitely American. So you had a big boat. So yeah, we essentially had a had a big boat. So here we were. Trying to drive on the other side of the road for the very first time in this massive car from from LA to Vegas. And let's just say, once we got to Vegas, we just ubered everywhere because we just didn't want to take, you know, it's just a distress. And that makes a difference too, because for me, you know, driving on the left side of the road, I was to your point, I was so grateful that I had this tiny little car. So I had more visibility. I was more aware of where I was. My my next time I was driving in Scotland and it was up in the Highlands and where the roads get narrow and a lot of times single lane and you have to navigate if there's opposite traffic coming. But I found myself, you know, like drifting too far to the left. I, you know, scraping up against the curb occasionally on that side. So, you know, not having the visibility of doing a giant car like I completely understand that issue. Yeah. Well, we're coming from New Zealand, where the majority of our cars are small compared to what the, you know, small sedans versus what the, you know, what we saw in the States anyway. We're all SUVs. All SUVs. We're in a big car. They'll get out of the way, but no, they're all big cars. So it's really the yep. One of my favorite stories, just kind of on this point, then then we'll move on, but my brother-in-law served in the military in the 80s in Germany. He was stationed in Germany and one of his platoon mates, whatever. I guess apparently you could pay 500 bucks and have any car from America shipped over to you because they were there for years. Yep. Had a big foot truck, a Texan with a massive truck jacked up. And so my brother-in-law telling stories how they would go cruise around and people would just see them coming and move off both directions. And they seem in the rear view mirror or up, you know, even if there's plenty of room, they would just move out of the way and just have that space. It's a I would have loved to have had that vehicle up on the Scottish Highlands or on down the South Island. Some of those, those areas, but anyway, well, let's move on. So you're watching Bill, you're, you're participating in Bill. You're watching consuming content, consuming content. Watching. Yep. And major takeaways. Yeah, I think there's a couple of exciting. So Azure Container apps is now GA, which is really exciting. Definitely going to be looking at, you know, new customer scenarios to use that technology, Azure Dev, the dev box stuff. So being able to just go and stand up at the VM running Visual Studio code, you know, latest PowerShell version, for example, all, you know, all those binaries really, really useful. Because I know for me personally, I stand up for Azure VM for testing or, you know, it might be running an Azure DevOps agent. I delete it. Yeah. A month, a month later, I go into the exact same thing, create the VM and, you know, and then do what I need to do, then delete it just to save on my Visual Studio Enterprise costings. But, you know, the smart, the smart idea would be shared. And, you know, do an image gallery stuff like that. But the Azure Dev box, I see getting really useful not only for production scenarios or businesses where a developer might come in to do a certain project or a contractor and then they might leave, but not only, but for us in IT being able to stand up environment in another company subscription that has all the controls with conditional access and stuff that the company offers, but, and then it's just deleted afterwards. And yeah, I think the technology's been there with Azure Virtual Desktop and just pays you go IAS machines and image being able to create custom images for a while, but seeing it bundled into like a Azure Dev Labs kind of service is kind of, it's pretty cool to see. So I expect that will be used quite. Yeah, that, that's again, not being, not being a dev in that space, but having helped manage Hyper B environments, Hyper View environments for years. And that was leaps and bounds. There were third party vendors that had similar stand up demo environments or demo, not demo, but, you know, but, you know, quick environments that you could kind of configure the different components and things around there, but have Microsoft actually run it out in Azure. And the fact that it's great that you want to stand something up, build something, test something out, then delete it, remove it, reset it, but that you can take a snapshot, easily stand up a similar environment, or you decide, Hey, you know, actually we want to, we like this, we like this third party, we're going to buy the other licensing board and just move it over into production or and to keep it in place. It's really exciting that they did that. I mean, I've used Microsoft's demo.microsoft.com and demo environments frequently, and it used to be like, it was 30 days, then you're done. That's it. You could, and then they changed that to where you could with permission extend that demo environment. And then they added later the ability to, well, now you can promote that and use it for production. You can pay for it. Like I want to keep this demo environment. I like what I've built. So I would probably never do that because I like mucking around and breaking things. So, so my demo environments in production would be probably, right? Well, that's a whole other discussion. You can, then there's, should you, should you? Yeah, yeah. And that's why they pay us the big bucks in IT, right? Apparently, but that concept. I mean, again, coming from the SharePoint world, there was a big push and we used to refer to it. I was at Microsoft back in the, you know, before the 2007 release and there for 2010 with sandbox solutions. And we used to refer to it as what we want is like a sandbox that we can go and play. And then they, of course, name it that. I was in a team that was a spinoff of Microsoft ID, which became MMS, which became BPOS, which is now Office 365. So I was there at the, near the beginning of that. Yeah. But that was, you know, that's actually the language we would use. Like we want to create an environment where people can go in and experiment, have all of the configurations of the organization, but try things out without breaking everything. So not production. That was back in the day when most people, again, the SharePoint world, if they were testing things out, it was usually on production. Yeah, I think like the technology has changed, but the people process has changed as well. Like five years ago, you still, you know, well, it's just been out 13 years, years now, and it's come a long way in that space. But having the technology is one thing, but you need the people and the processes to align. So you've gone from massive waterfall projects where everything needs, you know, you spend X amount of time on the requirements gathering, making sure you're spending a lot more time very early on. And that's not to say that you shouldn't do that. You should definitely like discovery base of a project is, is ideal to be successful. But with methodologies like agile, you know, being, being a bit more, having a bit more agility allows you to go, oh, we want to try something, but we don't know if it's going to work. Hey, let's just stand up a pock. Yeah, shut it down to leave it afterwards. We have our learnings. This is, you know, it's, it's, it's become a lot more consumable where you're trialing stuff a lot earlier in the piece than doing all the theoretical stuff and then hoping it all fits together at the end. Well, having those, you know, shorter list of requirements or outcomes, you know, being able to go in and iterate on that, take those learnings, fold it in or fail quickly and then go try something else around that. We're more aligned with doing that. Do you still run into a lot of customers that are more of the old fashioned, the waterfall, the longer projects? Are you fighting those battles? Yeah, and it's primarily because of the space that I operate in, like I, so I work for a MSP, so we, like a men's service provider, so we provide, we do projects for external customers, like standing up or migrate to Azure or migrate to M365, for example. So those, those type of projects we do statement of work, it's more aligned to an agile methodology, where previous organizations I've worked at the whole, right, what's your sprint cycle? So, you know, two weeks sprint, we're going to get this done. It's going to be, right, let's just, so there's a lot more, you can do a lot more continuous delivery when you're in the environment working 24 seven or you've got, you know, a custom act that you're building, for example, but the way that I work currently, because of the nature of our business is the clients want to move from an on-premise file server or exchange environment into M365, we do the statement of work, we have a waterfall based plan, you know, it's going to be done in six weeks, as an example, done, and then we'll look at the roadmap and continuous improvement exercises to go. What else, like you've got the technology now, let's improve it, but it's, yeah, the projects are more, this is outcome we want to deliver and by when it's not as much of a, but it's, yeah, they're a bit more longer pieces of work than like a two-week two-week sprint. So it's a bit, it's a bit hard to sort of use that methodology without, you know, going out of scope of something that we haven't signed off or... Yeah, it's interesting to think about that. I like, I look back at my career, like I, I talked about, you know, early in my career as a technical project manager, my, I had an 18 month project. I did other smaller projects, but thinking about like how I would break that up and like, to your point, it like, it wouldn't really fit. The goal, there were long lead items as part of this. We were doing data center consolidation. And I mean, I guess technically you could break it up into smaller projects. Like one component of that, there were four data centers involved. We were removing all of our systems from two, some of our systems from a third, consolidating to a brand new fourth data center. And so there were, you could treat each of those systems as a project or each of those locations as a, as a project. You know, but, you know, overall what, you know, I was measured on was that end to end 18 month process, not on the smaller pieces. But yeah, I guess we could have a longer conversation around kind of technical project management methodology and changes that are happening around there. I could spend hours, hours on this, but yeah. I still find it fascinating. It's funny, I mean, I've been around away from project management type functions, but I'm still really grateful to have had that experience. Like I never got PMP certified. I had a lot as a, as a manager. I paid for a lot of my direct reports to go through and get their PMP certification, that kind of thing. So I'm a believer in there. I look at, I got my MBA. That was project management enough. I don't need to go do something more around that. But it's a, but I'm so grateful that I had that training early on in my career because I've been able to utilize it in other roles throughout my career. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely project management or whether it's agile or waterfall or, you know, whether using can ban or, you know, another methodology or process or, you know, way of displaying the data, it's all valuable and you can use it elsewhere. You know, it's just, it's a function of steps to achieve an outcome at the end of the day. I would always tell people like, I don't care what your methodology is, as long as you utilize one, you know, use what makes sense, but follow something that's structured that'll move you through and, and follow that progress that everyone is following at the same, yeah, yeah, the same process. So in theory, yes. Well, there is that see right there. That's the adventure of project management is because there's always one or more people that aren't following that process. And, and that's where the soft skills come into play of. Yeah. Yeah. I really want to hurt that person that is not following the project plan. How can I do this legally and without a jar getting involved? Yeah, or the place. Yeah, yeah, or the place, you know. There's a certain level of, you know, violent shaking that you can do to another adult before the authorities have to get involved. I think that's okay. So, yeah, another, another product that Microsoft released during build that sounds really interesting as well as, you know, it's, it's going on the same thing as the Azure DevBox. It's the Azure deployment environment. So having a self-service web portal, being able to, you know, select what you want, like you might want a web app with the SQL backend, being able to select that and then have the Azure infrastructure as code or bicep templates kick that off and then create them. I think it's definitely a filling gap that we've been missing, especially around platform teams. So it's going to be really interesting to look at that closer. And get, get access and see what we can break with that, because being able to go, here's your self-service portal. Do whatever you want. Click on a button. Have your SQL app configured to the way that we have it as a standard. Not only with the templates, but, you know, relying on Azure policy as well to force that, but no public IPs exist in a subscription. As an example, IDP is an open TLS 1.2 and above is used on storage accounts. I think it's going to be really interesting to look at that and see where, you know, where that leads us. Well, I know that, you know, Microsoft has really been trying to build out their, you know, infrastructure and platform as a service capabilities so that developers, engineers, you know, entrepreneurs can focus on going and building things, trying things and not getting stuck in standing up environments and making sure the right pieces are there to be able to even start then creating something. So, I mean, this is an area that competitively, I think like Amazon's been doing, you know, really well for a long time, but this is one of the reasons why Azure's catching up very quickly. I still don't know where it is. I don't know how far Microsoft is from Amazon, but it's not too close. Yeah. But that was very cool. So, well, one last thing before we go, I, you know, so you had shared last week, but have you shared again kind of, so what was your path to becoming an MVP? Like, what did you have to go through? What were the steps? People are always interested to know and compare and contrast their own lives and their own desires to become an MVP. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting one. So, as in like I, when I was 14 years ago, just starting college in New Zealand, the equivalent. So, I started doing volunteer work at a local computer shop, essentially after school, during school holidays, fixing computers. By that time, it was Windows 95 days. Helping out there, then I ended up finishing college, getting a full-time job there, where I spent another X amount of years. But early on during, I think it was early 2000s, there was a movie. And ironically enough, that movie was called Antitrust. And it was about open source. So, at that stage, it was definitely very much playing around with Linux and all sorts of other things. But there was a saying in that movie, human knowledge belongs to the world. And it's always stayed with me. And so that triggered me to start blogging, putting in fixes that I found, all sorts of other things. So, I started a website. I started blogging. I started putting stuff up, even to this day, articles. So, I wrote back then, there. It helped teach me about technical writing. It was only really, at that stage, it was only really for myself to go back and have a look at what things happened. But then over time, as I changed roles, moved across different industries, the, it was a way of me learning publicly and helping to give back to the community. So, people didn't run to the same problems that I did, for example. Or I could go, this is how I've done it. Someone else may have different experiences, different ways of working, and then try and get their comments. So, I believe I never set out to become an MVP as a goal, because to be honest, I never thought I would achieve it. Some nerdy guy in a rural town in New Zealand, it was a goal that never occurred to me. And so, I've always had a passion for technology. I've been brought up alongside Microsoft technologies, Windows Server, Windows Desktop, all sorts of other things. And so, there was a stage in my career that I was a senior system engineer and looking out at all the jobs. And the shifts started to change from managing an on-premise environment into, oh, you need these cloud skills, Azure. It wasn't at the DevOps stage yet. It was more along the lines of, you need to know how to stand up and I SVM or something like that. So, I realized at that point that the environment that I was working in was very much still old school on-premises. And there was no due to data regulation and other things. There was really no foreseeable roadmap to move to the cloud. So, I made a step to leave and that was probably the best thing I ever did for my career because I suddenly got thrust into the cloud Azure world. And I loved it. The continuous change of technology, the different way of working, like we talked earlier about waterfall and agile methodology. So, that agile was sort of starting to come through around the same time in these organizations. So, yeah, for me, it was kind of, I wanted to learn more. So, I started to go write what do I need to learn? I started to write more articles, fleshed out my technical writing a bit more. As part of the learning process, I helped, like I help out on the Microsoft Tech community and the Q&A forums where I can as well because there's a whole lot of, right? Azure is such a huge platform. It's a huge category. Well, that's why I always ask people like, you're an Azure MVP, but it's so broad that there's so many things within that. I'm like, look, I'm part of the largest segment of MVPs, I believe, I'm in Office Apps and Services, which is again, all of those workloads. And so, you always have to ask, well, what do you specialize within that area? So, in Azure specifically. Yeah, so, yeah, it's almost like a sandpit full of a whole lot of Lego blocks and being able to just pick up and build whatever you want. So, yeah, the way, the work that I had and the type of environments that I operated in, I came through in the more, the compute space, the networking, you know, the infrastructure as code perspectives versus a dev. So, I've definitely come up with more of an IT professional focus than a dev focus, but the world's changed where actually, it's my belief that they're one and the same now. You still got your operational people because things still need to run whether in the cloud or not. But, you know, I started to learn things like being able to deploy pipelines with Azure DevOps and things like that. I'm definitely no expert, but... That's a good, that's a great area to go and build expertise around. I spent a number of years, you're probably not familiar with the company, but in the software configuration management space. And my interest in SCM as a category, and I worked with a company called Rational Software. They got bought by IBM, but this is so about 23, 24 years ago. I ended up selling my company, my startup, that I co-founded to Rational. But, you know, learning about SCM and, you know, code management, we actually ended up using ClearCase as a product as the engine for an information management and project management solution. So we actually morphed it and did other things with it. But that's one of those areas, again, we can get back and we can talk project management and technical project management all the time. But it's another area, I guess part of my point is that there are so many different areas in and around this. If you're interested in learning more about Azure, learning more about, you know, like all the different aspects within Azure, even as a business person, I'm marketing degrees, but I've been in tech my entire career, going and learning about this stuff. And there are product companies, there are service companies, MSPs and things that are out there that need marketing people with the basic understanding of the technology to be able to go and better serve their needs. Project managers, analysts, technical writers, I mean, non-technical functions in support of all of these different roles. There's just so much growth, so much opportunity. There is, and New Zealand, because so New Zealand doesn't have, like I mentioned very briefly about the data residency issues at a previous organization I worked at, New Zealand doesn't have Azure region yet. So we're leveraging Australia, like the Australia East and Southeast regions for our services. So there is a New Zealand region coming, which I'm really excited about. And another thing I thought would never happen, so which is going to help drive the growth in this market as well. And because there's a lot of companies still used to capex paying, like they'll pay for something, like a new host or sand, they'll put it in for three to five years, and then they'll sit on it during that period. Security holes, patching. And then if they see any real growth, then they struggle that. They hit those capacity issues very quickly. So yeah, that elasticity of the cloud is one of the most compelling stories of the value of that. And that's one of the reasons why I like it so much, because it is almost my, well, you know, it's everyone's own little mini data center at a pane of glass and being able to create things with scripts and all sorts of other things, like the world in IT has changed a lot. And it's quite exciting to see, because I'm the type of person who doesn't like to sit still and be stagnant. So my path to an MVP, from my perspective, has been mainly around helping the community on the tech forums, sharing my blogs out to the world, my view of what things look like, because you might write a blog about the exact same thing that I've wrote a blog about, but I've discovered something different because something happened or my setup was different to your setup. Well, I would likely write on the marketing or product marketing side of the topic. So it might be very different. But yeah, I mean, I always tell people that same thing. Even if we had similar skill sets, we might be in different industries. We have different real-world experience, customer examples. I mean, deployment experiences, problems that happen at different phases of things. So we'll have completely different perspectives. That's why I was encouraged. I remember having a conversation with somebody who's just like, yeah, but this other person, they really kind of wrote the definitive blog post on that. I'm like, that's ridiculous. They're not you. They don't have your audience. They don't have the trust that you have with your audience to go and write that same thing. If anything, if it is the ultimate blog post on that topic, then reference them, point to it, talk about it, and feedback on it, and then add your two bits to the end of it. And I think if there's a couple of things that I want to share with the audience today, it's being an MVP is nothing if it's not without the community. The technology and ways of working is one thing. But the tech community is just awesome. And it's 24 seven or you can eat. It's no longer I need people down the road from me who know about the same technology that I can talk to. It's across the world. I find that due to time, time zone differences in my work day that I actually talk a lot with the UK technology community more than I do New Zealand. Because by the time I'm working, they're working. And then by the time I finish working, the UK have woken up and started their day. So it is there is no like the community is the core of what the technology can do stuff. But the community make it work and offer their there. And that's what I like about it so much is there is like Azure is really good because it can take a company that's operating locally and serving their own local clients to a global company within that, you know, simplistic sake a few clicks. And the community that's been developed around these technologies and it is the exact same. And I just I love being a part of it and offering my view of what it looks like, whether I'm an MVP or not. It's it's a passion that that really drives me in the continuous learning and challenges because who wants to be stagnant, right? The other thing that I would say so my just to go back to your question, my my is part of my nominations to be an MVP. I had to write in like everything that I've done over the past year. And I think there was a there was a good 180 items that I ended up adding because they were all helping out people on the tech community. There was blog articles, there was sharing stuff. There was editing Microsoft documentation. Like if I saw some if I was reading something and I noticed that something wasn't quite right, I would go and open up a full request on GitHub with my edits. All those things add up and you don't need to be a public speaker. You know, at a huge conference that this is what I like about the award so much is there's so many different ways to contribute and earn the MVP award. Not everyone's the same, not everyone like I learned by reading blog articles more than I would like a video because I'd get distracted. That aspect, it's hard for some people to understand. It is a bit of a black box. There's no checklist of thing. Hey, if you do these 10 things, you become an MVP. It's very different. There are some people that are 100% forums. That's it. They never want to present. They haven't written any books. They're afraid of getting in front of a camera, but they are just constantly on the forums and answering questions and adding value that way. There are others that write books. There are people that are and we see all the people, all the names that are out there that you're familiar with that are regulars at conferences. I used to do two or three conferences a month. I did that for about a decade. And of course, this little pandemic thing happened and slowed that down. But it made me kind of read, look at and prioritize what I want to do. And so I have the ability to go and do things. I work for a company that's supported and will pay for travel to most of these events. But I just, I look at it and say, you know what? I'm doing other things that I'm satisfied with it, that I'm giving back to the community. I'm doing these things. And I'd rather do that than take all the time to travel. I miss friends. I miss getting out and do events from time to time. But it's a mixture of those things. And of course, you know, we're getting ready for renewal. So everybody, every MVP around the world is across. Did I do enough? Did I give back enough for that? But it's a, but there are a lot of different ways that you can give back. It doesn't have to be. So if you are fearful of getting up on a stage, you do not have to get up on a stage. There's no requirement to ever do that. No, but I guess that's the thing, like now I am an MVP and like an award that I never thought I would get. There's so many opportunities for me to either continue with the way that I obviously was adding value to the community because I got the award in the first place. Or I can, you know, I'm quite excited because it's allowing me to step outside my comfort zone like this podcast. For example, a couple of years ago, I would never have had this chat with you. I try to scare people away at those people. See, that's the thing. That's that first layer. I try to make people fearful of talking to me. That's my goal. But and I think at the end of the day, and this is something that I personally struggle with is back yourself. You know, you look at all these articles and you look at the web website and it's that iceberg analogy. All you see is the stuff above the water. You don't see all the failures that people have gone through, all the learnings. You don't see the nights that people have spent banging their head against the theoretical wall. All you see is what the success looks like, all the lights at the top of the iceberg. I look at people and I go, how am I in MVP in the same bucket of people as that person because they've wrote a really awesome thing that automates X. But everyone's quite individual. And you just don't know what is happening. Well, that's something too. Because there are definitely MVPs out there that I kind of put up on a pedestal or like that. Then I got to know them. Still, like good friends with. But then you realize, hey, everybody's human. Everybody has weaknesses. They have their, I just always joke that like nobody knows everything as a SharePoint MVP. Nobody knows everything about SharePoint. It's like, there's actually three or four people that I would argue do know everything about SharePoint, but they have other flaws and other things around them. And again, they're human. And so I actually prefer it when MVPs show that kind of sensitive side. Show, talk about failures as much as successes. I think I learn as much or if not more from people's failures. It's not about the one time where I did something and it worked. It's here's the dozen times. Here's what I tried. Here's what I learned, why it didn't work and what was wrong with this approach. Yeah, sometimes that kind of learning is even more valuable than, you know, this is how you do something. And I think that's one of the things, like going back to the tech community in general. We're all at the end of the day. You know, we almost quarrel and quarrel a family, but we're, well, friends that we can select, but it's a team of people. It's, yeah, I think we kind of mentioned the board collective last week, but yeah, it is, but without the assimilation. But it is, my strength might be different to someone else's. And there, you know, it's being an MVP or even just being someone in the tech community. You know, it doesn't matter if you've got an award or not. It's you're part of a team. And even if you can't do something because some reason or you may not be looking at it the right way, or you might just need to run some, you know, you're struggling with something and you need to run through it with someone else. It's just, there's a plethora of people across the world who are eager to help you. And no doubt they may have problems with something else. Yeah, it's definitely, it's just, we're all learning, you know, whether it's the same technology or different technology or you might be using Azure Web Apps to host one website or you might be using, you know, VM scale sets to run the exact same website a different way. You know, it's just, and there's so many ways you can build those Lego blocks as well. It's just, it's exciting to be around and see. And so I think my path to MVP is mainly trying to give back to the community the best way I know how, which is helping out, helping people out on the forums, blogging, sharing, sharing stuff on my Twitter and LinkedIn and just having the passion for the technology and trying new things and trying to be as cutting edge as possible. Well, one thing I always like to, this is a great, well said, one thing I always throw out there and I'm sure you'll agree is that for those that are watching, listening, if you have questions and if you have an MVP, you know, certainly, you know, Luke and myself that you follow or, you know, have questions for, don't be shy, reach out. These are some of the most friendly and approachable people, which is one of the reasons it is a characteristic of any piece is how approachable we are. There are a couple that are cranky, I will admit, but they're still approachable. It just depends on pre-coffee for me, really. That's right. That's right. Yeah, be aware of time zones when you're reaching out as well, you know. But you're right. It's kind of like if someone, because I've had people message me about, oh, do you know the answer to this and it's kind of like, oh, no, I don't. But you know, let's find out. Let's try it. Or I know somebody. I know somebody who knows the answer to that. Or I know something. Yeah, you pass them on. It's not as if I'm, you know, it's going, I'm here to help as much as anyone else. So, you're right. Well, Luke, I really appreciate your time again for the re-record. I really appreciate the time. And for folks that want to find out more about you, get in touch. What are the best ways to reach you? You can look me up on Twitter, which is Luke Murray NZ. So L LinkedIn, which is L J Murray. So that's L J M U R R A Y. And then my Twitter handle is Luke L U K E M U R R A Y NZ. But you can find me through any of those and don't hesitate to. Of course, I have the links. I'll have the links here within YouTube and within the blog post, as well as your blog site as well. So Luke, well, happy. Enjoy the rest of of a build that's going on. So and then we'll connect soon. Hopefully see each other next year for the MVP summit. It's the best part of being an MVP. Is that the best perk within the program? Yeah, yeah, I've already told my wife. It's like just an FYI. You know, I've I'm pre-booking and I'm saving for this trip. I hope it does happen. It'll be a life dream to go to to go to Redmond. But yeah, it's just like I've already put in the feelers the family of going, oh, by the way, I might be taking a trip overseas. Very cool. Well, we'll see you soon. Cool. Thank you.