 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Esteban. Hey, good afternoon. Hey, Christian. How are you? I'm really excited to be here joining you on this chat. Yeah, no worries. And so for folks that don't know you, who you are, what you do, why don't you give us the background? Who you are, where you are, what you do. Sure. So my name is Esteban Garcia. I live in Orlando, Florida. I'm an Azure and DevOps expert. I've been in the software development space for over 20 years. I'm a Microsoft MVP in DevOps developer technologies. I've been an MVP for about nine years. Also, I'm a Microsoft Regional Director. I just came into my third year. I just got renewed a few weeks ago. As my day job, I'm a Senior Vice President of Azure and the DevOps for a company called New Signature. So I help companies move to the cloud. I help software development teams deploy early and often and deliver as much value as possible to the business. Yeah, that's me and I'm not sure. Well, I know we're kind of the MVP, RD twins. So we both earned our first in January. Well, when in 2012, what month? In April or July. You're the first half of the year. Yeah, yeah. So I always tell people that I'm, so now, because I was January of 2012, I tell people that I've been an MVP for nine and a half years. Yeah, at some point, things got shifted and then there was one year when we had two MVP summits and then it's been a little bit of a shift in things over the years. And then like you, this is my first renewal for the two year term for the Regional Director. And for those people, I know I get a lot of questions. The first thing people think when they hear Microsoft Regional Director is like, how long have you been working for Microsoft? And of course, we're not employees. We're unpaid advisors. And really were the way it was explained to me is that we're advisors to like the top echelon of Microsoft, like the, you know, the directors, GM's, VP's and above that. And the level of interaction in we have got a bunch of distribution groups, email groups that we participate in. We can actually talk about that in a minute, why they hold so tightly to email list distribution list versus other tools. I would love to get your thoughts on that. Because when we both came in, that was a very impassioned discussion. And it was tempered this last time with all the newbies coming in. But there are roughly around 200 RDS globally. So it's, yeah, have you participated in any like white papers or any specific, you know, topics, you know, to provide feedback back to Microsoft in your RD role? Yeah, I think this time last year, I participated in a white paper where we were putting together some information on how people are adopting the cloud and how people are buying Azure and things like that. So that was a pretty impactful thing that we're able to bring back to the product team. But yeah, it's a great program to be in because, you know, at the end of the day, we almost become this advocate for the, not just for the community, but for the corporate world that all these users that are using Microsoft technologies. It's not just a single technology, right? From the MVP perspective, everyone knows me as this guy who's an expert on the DevOps for Azure DevOps, formerly TFS. But when we look at RD, it goes beyond that, right? It's companies who are leveraging Microsoft technologies. How are they using it? Maybe something that's intended for one thing, but then the company is in a different way. To be able to take that feedback back to Microsoft and have the voice of the user back to corporate, it's a super impactful. Well, and I guess that's the key difference between the MVP program is that the MVP is a reward. It's a recognition for what you did for the community in the year prior. And so it's not even necessarily anything, any interaction with Microsoft, it was giving to the community. I said, these are, you know, across the board, they're people that go above and beyond what their day job has them do. It's not, in fact, is part of your, the application process where you're sharing, you know, here's what I've done out in the community. Like you don't count the things that you were paid by your boss to do your company. This is the stuff that you're doing above and beyond. And like I was very active for many years in the SharePoint Saturday thing. And as most people know, my company was, I was very thankful that they paid for my flights and things out there. It was my weekends. I was giving away. It was, you know, those sessions and one year I did, it was the most I ever did in a single year. I did 18 SharePoint Saturday events. Wow. It was 18 of my weekends to give away. And yeah, my wife and children were not as impressed. But, you know, it's just a lot of time away. But yeah, it's, you know, versus the regional director program, which is where, as you point out, there's opportunities for us to share our deep industry insights. And to have it's more of a two-way conversation with Microsoft, provide this feedback, sometimes work through and solve problems. The actual mechanics of how Microsoft, you know, offers their solutions to the world. And it's actually a common occurrence where an RD will post to one of the lists and say, I have three customers. I've seen this. This is a problem. This is how Microsoft does this. And here's what we actually expect to happen. Yeah. Why is that? How can we change this and work through it? And it's fantastic to see VPs and all the way down the chain, you know, jump in and right there to, you know, provide feedback. It's been really eye-opening to see how hands-on, especially the senior execs, get in a lot of these issues that are customer impacting. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, the expectation is that these are people who are going to obviously have a technology focus, but are able to speak to the business and have an impact across multiple different technology aspects within our organization, right? You know, with, you know, I know my expertise is in Azure and DevOps, but I'm having conversations with executives about how they should be using their collaboration things, right? Right. In your case, you're probably having some conversations at least bringing back information to Microsoft about how companies are thinking about the cloud strategy as well, right? So it's, it's, it goes beyond what Microsoft is. I think it's probably about half of the RDS were not NDPs, right? So it's not, you don't have to be. Yeah, it's about half, right? So, yeah, it's a great, you know, all these Microsoft programs are amazing to be involved with because, you know, you get to interact with a lot of people who are, you know, like-minded, community-minded, and people who are out there talking to customers and at the same time, like you said, get to interact with some people at Microsoft that typically on my day-to-day basis, I wouldn't be able to interact with, or at least just watch some conversations over email, like I go beyond what I typically would see. Well, generally, NDPs and RDS, you know, the same way are, again, very, you know, active in the discussions that are happening in the community and, you know, some of us more interacted than others with Microsoft teams. There's a lot of, we get invited to, well, as you did, to write a white paper, which will never be seen by the world. It's for internal consumption only. Sometimes there were, like I'm sure you have. I've written papers, articles that have appeared under the Microsoft brand as part of docs.microsoft.com. And, you know, in help there, I've done other research where Microsoft co-sponsored or sponsored fully independent research that, you know, my team has done. And it's a lot of those opportunities that come up because of the status, which is, obviously, it's a great thing. But I know, just for everybody out there wondering, it's like, well, this is all fine and dandy for you guys that are already NDPs and RDS. But something that Microsoft asks us to do constantly is to look out there and help them identify the next wave of NDPs and RDS. So finding people that are, you know, passionate about community number one. And then two, that look for those opportunities and novel ways of reaching audiences but serving the community. Yeah, I, you know, before I became MVP, four years before that I had started speaking at user groups and codecamps. And, you know, with my community involvement, I became an MVP. And now I'm still involved with those events. Now a little different with everything being virtual, but I'm always in the lookout for, you know, speakers who are trying to help the community. And so guiding a little bit of a mentor to them on how to become an MVP. I've helped four or five people become an MVP over the last few years. It's a great, it's really rewarding to be able to see that path, right? At least create a path for people to be able to get there. Yeah, agreed. And something that's also interesting too is that so you've been an ALM MVP from the start. That's what you were originally. Yeah, my first MVP was in ALM. And then the ALM program had been around for a couple of years before I got there. So it was a few people that had been there before me. But yeah, my, I was first ALM and that later on became developer technologies. But that's my focus was initially was all about TFS and moved on to, you know, Azure. Visibility online and Azure DevOps. So yeah, it's an evolving thing. It's interesting because that space and I shared with you beforehand. You know, my, my background, I was started out as a business analyst and project manager, but I've been in IT for 30 years and got into the, you know, what we now know is the DevOps space. And, you know, I got involved with, in fact, I started a co-founder of the company that we sold the rational software back in 2001. But for years, I had a relationship with, with rational. And if you, if you remember the rational, you know, the rational rows as well as their software configuration management solutions, you know, that they're really well known for IBM. Of course, acquired them. I had a short relationship with IBM before I wrote a book on clear quest. They're clear case and all those clear cases, the SEM platform. So I wrote two books on, on a clear case related to one on clear quest. I think it's the only book that was ever written on clear quest there because it really didn't need to have a whole book to itself. But we did. And it's actually performed pretty well. But they, it came, it went live. It was published about a month after I started working for Microsoft. So they wanted me to promote it. And I'm like, sorry, I can't promote my book. I can't do it. Sorry. But I was going to ask you, so, you know, the, the DevOps space is, you know, for a long time it wasn't really a space that Microsoft was known for. And so it's still relatively new things. And when I was back in the SEM world and the work that we did, you know, it wasn't this cohesive group of all the technologies, things that were out there. So, you know, how has that space matured in the Microsoft ecosystem? Yeah, it's been a pretty interesting journey to see over, over the years. Right. If you look back, you know, 20 years ago when many companies out there were using VisualSourceSafe and there's probably a few out there that still have that one VisualSourceSafe. Was that a Microsoft project or was that an acquisition? It was an acquisition. Okay. So they acquired the company. And the same team that they acquired then later built Team Foundation Server. So TFS was a Microsoft product by the same team led by Brian Harry that had built VSS before that. Well, because they had also hired some clear case guys. That's how it just, I was aware of some of that back in that. Yeah. That was like, was that 2003, 2004? Yeah. So TFS, the first version was in TFS 2005 that was released somewhere around 2006. Right. Yeah. So yeah, it's probably around then. So TFS, the initial version was all about version control and build automation, a very rudimentary build automation system. Over time, it started including things like user story management, task management, the work item system that TFS had, then they added test case management. And once they added test case management, they started, so rebranded or started talking about the ALM space. Now they could truly say, this is not just a developer tool. This is a tool that helps you get from idea to as close to production as possible. Right. You know, user stories, you can do version control, you can build, you can do test case management. Yeah. In fact, when that came out, so was that 2005? No, the first MTM version, Microsoft Test Manager was 2012, I believe. Was it that late? Okay. I just, I just remembered that we, so we deployed TFS though, and back in 2005 for this client. Oh yeah, TFS 2005 was the initial version. I remember that was like, you got to follow all these steps and eventually now it's like, click, click, click, go. So the part that I owned of that, I mean, so my, my team was part of the, that deployment, but we was also project server. That's how I found my way into SharePoint. That was my beginning was because that we, as part of that, we deployed the WSS. So was that 2.0? Yeah. That sounds right. Because I remember the TFS game with SharePoint. Yeah. Probably a lighter version of SharePoint. WSS 2.0. Yeah. And then later when 3.0 came out and yeah. That's right. And that eventually they removed the SharePoint piece and then you're able to have some nice dashboards within TFS. And they started, they mature the agile side. These are story, and they started catching up with some of the other vendors out there that have some of the agile tooling. And then around 2013, they acquired another release management tool. And then they added that to TFS 2013 and around 2015 they finally had something that you could truly say you could follow something from idea all the way to production that would release management. Right? So it's a bit of a journey to get there. And then over the past five years, they've done a big shift from a fully on-premises solution to now a SaaS solution with Azure DevOps. Along the way, you have TF, Team Foundation Service, you have Visual Studio Online, and then Azure DevOps, which shows about a few different names. Azure DevOps. And I know there was a, so I actually have an interview scheduled where we're going to talk about the similarities, the differences between Project Online, Azure DevOps, and Planner. And then ask some big questions around, I don't, I actually have quite, maybe you know a little bit more, but is Microsoft even thinking about some kinds of integrations in between those three? Because there are massive gaps. There are three standalone separate solutions today that look and act in some ways alike and are serving common needs, but... Yeah. Yeah. I've heard some things about nothing that's been, I guess, public enough to be able to talk about, but it's just funny because if you look back at 2010, there was a clear connection between TFS and Project Server. Right. You could make that connection, you could make updates, and there would be a two-way synchronization that was removed at some point, kind of exactly when, but I've heard some people ask for that again. So, you know, what all those changes, all the things that they've been adding to Azure DevOps, now Azure DevOps has become the best way to be able to deploy to Azure, right? So, it's a great tool. You can deploy to any cloud, but there's probably no better way to deploy something to Azure, right? If you have a built pipeline, whether your code is coming from GitHub, from Bitbucket, from Azure DevOps itself, once you get into Azure Pipelines, you're able to get to Azure, right? And it's a journey from where they are to where they are right now. Even, you know, being able to move to a SaaS platform where they are releasing new features every three weeks and instead of waiting two, three years for new features, it's been a pretty big change that they've done. And now, that whole team is now sort of shifted their focus, you know, with the GitHub acquisition, now two years ago, it's crazy how time flies, right? It was two years ago when Microsoft announced that acquisition. Now you have a lot of those people working on the GitHub side, and a lot of those people are starting to build a lot of features with GitHub, so that's going to be a... And I'm not, you know, active within the community. I read up on a few different things. I know quite a few people that have kind of moved over from, you know, the Microsoft collaboration stack over into the DevOps world and some that have left the Microsoft ecosystem, good friends that have kind of gone over as DevOps as a category, as a space. I mean, there's massive conferences globally. Or there were before the COVID happened, but yeah, there, you know, but these events and I've always wondered like kind of Microsoft's position within that world. Again, I just, I don't have any personal insights into, you know, how Microsoft is in the solutions on this side of the world, you know, kind of stand up to competitive solutions. It's been an evolving thing. I remember being, I think it was around 2015, I spoke in Austin, Texas, at a DevOps day in Austin. My session and one more session by someone else were the only Microsoft focused sessions out of the entire two day event. Everything else was, everything about Microsoft, right? I might have been at that event. Oh yeah? There was a, well, there was a, 2015 or 2016, I'll have to go back and look, but it was, so Naomi Moneypenny, who's now at Microsoft, Eric Shupps and myself and a couple other folks. I'm trying to remember who else was on stage, Eric Harlan, whatever did a, but a Microsoft centric, we did a keynote, a panel upon one of the stages at that event, but anyway. So, but now when I go to the Microsoft, or sort of to the DevOps events, there's so much more talk about Microsoft, right? I mean, think about the transformation that Microsoft itself has done since 2014, where now it's a much more open Microsoft. It's a much, it's a Microsoft that no longer cares about only deploying to Azure. It's a, well, with our tools, you're able to deploy to AWS, you're able to deploy to Google. Well, I think that's one thing that I have read and seen in numerous places and read some of the comments about is that people are surprised and pleased that Microsoft has left GitHub alone. You know, largely they've not gone in and made it a Microsoft only technology and that is, I mean, a lot of that, I mean, you have to credit the leadership of Satya and his first keynote, where he demoed on, I believe it was an iPad. I was trying to remember if it was an iPhone or an iPad, but his first keynote, which was at the partner conference when he became CEO, his first public address and he demos on that technology and he made a statement, I'll paraphrase it because I don't remember exactly what he said, but he said, you know, our goal is to build the best software in the world kind of statement. And he said, and where we don't have the best solution or any solution, we will partner and we will integrate because we need to provide the best experiences for our customers. And he talked about, he's like, we may have the best of this piece and the best of this piece, but this is what our customer is trying to do and we have to make sure that they have a good experience along the entire continuum, not just with the pieces we own. And I mean, that was just, that's a fundamental difference from the bomber era. 100% and then, you know, focusing on the integration points, like from GitHub, for example, now you're able to integrate into Azure, they're able just so you can integrate into other tool sets out there. You're able to deploy to Azure, just like you can deploy to AWS or GCP or even on-premises, right? So I think keeping that in mind and then just enabling developers on the world to be able to do more with the tooling is a big deal. Yeah. Well, what kind of stuff are you actively presenting on? What do you present on top of that? Back when we used to do conferences. So a couple of things I'm pretty passionate about is one is I help companies or I help teams go to the cloud. And in my mind is you can't be successful with the cloud without having a DevOps mindset. And by that I mean being able to deploy early and often a repeatable thing, being able to automate as much as possible and creating that feedback loop, right? So a nice combination of both DevOps and cloud. So I speak about infrastructure as code. So a great way for you to be able to spin things up and turn things down and then spin them again the exact same way every single time. I talk about something called application insights, which is being able to get telemetry of your running application and make decisions. The word telemetry is part of the Microsoft drinking game. I'll just take a sip. Awesome. And then lately, especially over the last six months, I've known one virtual conference. I was going to speak at my first international conference in May. I was going to go to Sweden for DevSum. But instead I did it from here from Orlando. I spoke about GitHub and how to leverage GitHub to get to Azure. So if you're a GitHub developer, how do I get my code? What are the things I'm able to do? And right-click, deploy, that doesn't count, right? So really, how do you set up your pipelines on your Azure or your GitHub actions to be able to get to Azure? So a lot of that, I would call developer enablement to go a little bit faster. That's where I'm typically at. Yeah, that's a good space. But we've talked about there's... Microsoft has gotten so much better at documentation and the guidance to end users, business users, as well as admins and developers at all levels, the number of resources that are out there. I always like to ask people that want to learn more, where are your recommended first steps to understand Microsoft's vision for ALM and where to go and get up to speed with the latest? Yeah, so just like the product has evolved, the documentation has evolved so much. There's a very immersive set of documents, both on the Microsoft side and the GitHub side. GitHub has its great labs where you're able to follow along and it's super interactive. So typically you can go there. There's a few courses out there on LinkedIn Learning and in PluralSight as well that people can follow with different tracks. But my first go-to is start with Azure DevOps documentation and you're going to start there. It's really easy to follow a guide to be able to learn whether it's on the team collaboration side with the agile tooling, whether it's on the pipeline side or on the version control side. So it's pretty powerful stuff right there. That's very cool. Well, if people want to find out more about you and get in touch with you, what's the best way that they can reach out to you? Yeah, this is the way. I try to be somewhat active on Twitter, so Esteban F Garcia on Twitter is where you can find me. Also reach out to me on LinkedIn. Those are the easiest ways for us to just reach out. Reach out. I'm happy to collaborate with you. Yeah, and that's always kind of the rule of thumb for MVPs and RDs, but obviously MVPs especially. We are all open to connecting. So if you ever just follow one of us writes or you hear us or whatever it is, see us like come up, just reach out to us. I always like to say, especially through LinkedIn, attach a note like, hey, I just read this or I just saw like a reason for connecting is always nice. I agree with you. Yeah, that goes a long way. Yeah, because if there's no obvious connection, I might not connect with the person, but otherwise somebody says, hey, I just saw you in this webinar or I caught one of your sessions in this conference, like I'll immediately connect with those people. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, even if it's, you know, maybe able to connect you with some piece of information or connect you with someone, you know, I'm happy to do those things. Anything that can do to help people continue on their cloud journey or their devil's journey, it's, you know, you can't know everything, but at least if I'm able to connect you with that piece of information, I might be solving that so much problem. That's sometimes the best help is, you don't expect everybody to know the answer to everything, but if you can point me to the person who knows the answer, that's a great resource. Well, that's the bottom. It was really great connecting and catching up and hopefully we'll be able to see each other in person one of these days someday. That's great. Definitely thank you for having me on. It was great speaking with you and I definitely enjoy the conversation. All right, talk to you later. All right.