 Everyone, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Bernat. Hello. Hi. I almost say it correctly, but yeah. Great. So close. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? So my name is Bernat Agullo. I'm living in Barcelona and I'm a partner in a small data consulting company and we help our customers get their data right. Oh, that's just that easy. Wow. Well, yeah. I mean, my story is a bit more complex than that. I come from an engineering background and then I went to, I did some Erasmus program in Germany, but then I decided I wanted something more fancy. So I went to Japan and not only that, but I did a PhD in sort of like organizational behavior. So I went right into the social sciences realm and somehow I managed to finish that, but I also decided that this was not my thing. So after hanging out there a little longer with a friend I made, I helped him like doing stuff in Excel and so on. And when I came back, I managed to move into the, to Excel and macros because yeah, there's a lot of work there and that's what I started really doing macros. So I just like done one before that job, but that job was like macros and Excel. So I did like for five years, I love that because it's like every day I learn new stuff. Eventually, I had to move out of that project and I like, well, did some other stuff. And at some point, I joined another project where I was doing macros, but macros with a SQL server. So I learned SQL, which was very nice. And from there, I finally moved to my current company. And then that's what I learned like integration services. And then I did something with Tableau at the beginning. And then at some point I did see Power BI. I was like, whoa, this is very nice. And I love that a lot. And then I did the project in click and it was like, oh my God, I love Power BI so much now. And then I, well, and there was a pandemic and all that. And at some point, I heard about projects were like not coming that often. Yeah. And I decided, okay, well, it's not a big deal. Let's learn this Power BI thing all to the very bottom of it. Yeah. So in the process, what happened is, I don't know, during the pandemic, one of the side effects is that I gave up on Facebook and I started hanging out in Twitter. It's like, okay, which I hated before. And I was like, okay, then when I started focusing on Power BI, I said, okay, let's see what's up in Power BI in Twitter. And then I found out that's like, quite an interesting thing going on. And then I also saw that even when I posted something, and I received very warm welcome is like, wow, this is cool. And so on is like, wait, wait a minute. And then I realized, okay, let's do this properly. So I started a block. I started the Power BI only Twitter account. Actually, the other one just died. And I started being very focused on that. So I would not follow anything out of Power BI. I would not like even things that were not Power BI. I will only post Power BI stuff. And I keep focusing on also on putting stuff on my block. Yeah. So at some point it started to work. So also I did, well, in this process, I discovered this MPP thing as like, oh, this is very nice. And okay. So let's see how this works. So I started to look for opportunities to share what I was there. At the beginning, I was fine just in the hanging out in the Power BI user group in Barcelona, which is a WhatsApp group mostly. I mean, they do have like some activities going on on Meetup. But this is a very active and very nice WhatsApp group. And then from there, I, somebody said, hey, there's this activity. Why don't you, I don't know, who's up? It was like, I don't know. I could do something on calculation groups, which was a topic that people were starting to think of me and calculation groups like as a together thing. Because I would always post things about calculation groups. And I said, maybe I can handle like an introduction to calculation groups presentation. And I did that in the Power BI boot camp in 2021. Was that your first time presenting? I mean, you did. Yeah, I jumped right into that. But I mean, with your with your education, you had a lot of experience going through and presenting and defending your work and doing that side of it. So it's that's harder than than doing it. But sometimes people just make it to be so scary to do that first session, share my work. I don't want people to be critical of the project. Yeah, this is something I realized in my job now with my partner. And he like wrote a PowerPoint. And then I like, would you like some feedback? He gives me and I was like, this is out, out, out, out. This should be the other way. And he has to grow used to my very extensive feedback on anything that I'm asked about. Hey, have somebody to go through and do editing. That's a cherished thing. I wish I need more of that in my life. Yeah, this is, I think it's basically what I learned on my PhD is to write properly. But this is very valuable. Like, what do you want to say, you know, like, don't go around it, don't make words that look nice and really like be able to say, this is, yeah, just a filling word. And this is what you mean. Bernard, I have to tell you, I'm a bit stuck on the Japan organizational management PhD. Well, don't worry too much about it. Well, the only reason because I so I absolutely love, I took Japanese I've forgotten it all, you know, but took it when I was younger. I almost moved my family there for an earlier job. But I also so I had I was on the fence of doing an MBA, which I ended up doing in technology management or the MAOM and going that route, because my plan was to go get a PhD in social informatics and study collaboration technology and the impact. So the social teams like so we'll have to we'll have to have a conversation separately on that. Yeah, probably take a look. But it was very, very cool. I mean, in the space, it was funny when I think it would be when you're talking about macros, like, so I was a hardcore Excel like 30 years ago is started my career as an analyst and a technical writer. And the old version of Excel before they Microsoft, you know, like kind of rebuilt it. And so I would build these simple macros and automate printing and table creation and kind of for publishing purposes. And, you know, it got so complex very quick, but it almost feels like with power platform, and with all the data platform, MBPs, and specifically people doing power platform development, that we're getting back into kind of where it feels like where I started in my career, which was databases everywhere, combining and integrating databases, trying to build intelligent applications. Of course, we were there was no system or platform for building them 30 years ago, we were, it was very rudimentary and very messy. But it just feels like we're getting back into that world where everybody is kind of experimenting with building apps and creating pulling from multiple data sources. And it's just it's a growing area. True. I mean, what I mean here that the business that Microsoft is holding into is that there's a lot of people waiting for the IT team to solve their problems. And they will hear, they will listen to what they have to say. And they allow this, well, working solutions to be put in place, but then of course comes the governance. How are you going to do that? Do you even allow the user to get what they want? The answer should be so yes, because at least when the IT has the time to do it, at least we'll have something that already works to get in the hands into, which is much better that we need so and so. And then when they are finished, maybe this is not needed anymore. So in the process, you'll have some solutions that will fall apart and the other ones that will stick. And so I think it's a good thing that people are more empowered to do what they want to do. But you cannot forget about doing things properly. So you need to have a good way to do things. You cannot leave everything around forever. That's one of those big questions around the governance around building all these solutions. And it's not that there's one answer for that. It's not like, hey, I installed the governance app and we're good now. No, it's takes a lot more thought and runs around. But I do like that idea, having been in largely IT organizations most of my career of encouraging people to go and self-solve, even if they just do a mock-up. I mean, I remember people bringing to us, I ran a shared services team for years, and people would bring like a mock-up that they built in PowerPoint. Here's how I want it to. This is what I needed to do. It was like, hey, well, that's a lot more to go and build a solution. That's better than an email, indeed. The flip side of that is organizations need to be looking at the solutions that their people are. They can't just say, oh, yeah, well, it's going to be scalable. It'll work. It'll be secure. We're compliant. No, you can't just assume those things. You need to have a process to review. I mean, it's good because you allow people to think deeply on the problem. Yeah, sometimes, of course, the customer will come up with a solution that they imagine, and maybe they don't know that there's some other technology that can maybe make things better. But in terms of interface, it's very, very helpful what they imagine because it's what will feel natural to them. And if you have something better that you think it's better, then you have to prove it. But they already have some idea. And, well, I don't know. That's what I like, especially on BI, having one feet on the technical side and one feet on the business side, you need to learn so many things. Now I'm like, I don't know, loans. There's so many concepts going on. I have to learn all these things to make sense of all the data that they're going about. And, well, and then it was hotel reservations or anything that comes into the business. And it's fun. It's fun, actually. But I actually like the fact that not being there forever, you know, it's just like kind of a story that you leave, you help, you do it best. And it's like, okay, now you're good to go. And you can take on another challenge. Well, that's something about, you know, I think about the gig economy and, you know, and project workers or consultants. And for many years, I mean, I'd say the first half of my career, you know, it was almost like looked down upon. It's like, oh, you worked on that project for four months, then you went and did something else, like, whoa, you can't hold down a regular job. It's like, well, hiring a lot of these people is like, look, I hired them to solve that problem. They did. We looked around for some other things. Maybe there's another project or not. But there's it's, it's much more acceptable now to think that way about finding skilled personnel to build things. But yeah. Yeah. But after all, it's also about helping people get things done, you know, and it is always a good thing to do. And that's, I think that's what I like most about this job is the fact that I can help people. Like, we have this problem. Okay, we can do it this way. And I was like, oh, beautiful. And I was like, okay, let's do this. And yeah, and it's quite creative after all. I mean, even if we're like, we have a very, you know, fixed outcome, what they, what they want and how it should look at the same time. Now there's even more options than they used to be. And I'm like, oh, should we do that in data factory or SSIS or I don't know, power query? I don't know. There's so many interactions between the different technologies now. They're like, well, we could start with this and then maybe we'll move to some other thing else. And even from the technology side, it's not so square as I believe it used to be at least. And also from the governance side, now I'm in the Melissa coach course and also like, well, you could do this or you could do that. It depends on your organization and what you value most and how the culture is. And so at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you think a lot and okay, let's go this way. And from there we'll take it. If it's wrong, then we'll change course. Otherwise we'll stick with it. I cannot do much better than this. My philosophy is always like, well, let's move things forward. You can't, I mean, you can't measure what you've not taken action on, what you've not moved forward on. Just learn from that. Go and iterate, fail quickly, learn from it, improve upon it. Yeah. Get your best decision with what you have now and then maybe later you'll have more things and then you'll have a better decision, but it's okay. It's okay. Well, that's kind of the secret to management. It's management is about making decisions for the business and you have to make decisions based on limited data. And so you do your best with the data that you have and then you learn and you adjust as you go. That's part of what I like about a lot of the data platform space, the power platform space is that, again, let's go and iterate on this. Let's build a solution that solves this. Because the other problem, this goes back to my business analyst role at the beginning of my career. It's like, when do you ask people, what are you trying to achieve? What do you want out of this solution? And people will share their requirements, the desired outcomes, based on their lens of understanding today. So if they're going to go and give you the requirements based on what they think the limitations are of the system. So if you go in and show them all this fancy advance, keep them like, we can do all these things, suddenly their requirements will pile up. They'll get very crazy. Then you have to pair it down. What do you actually need there? And so that's why the iterative process allows you to help them envision what else you can do, which opens up their minds to, hey, I didn't even think of this. If we can do that, then that allows us to also do these other things, integrate with this other system, or automate this aspect. This style is still hard to sell at least here in Barcelona. Look, just assign us some people and we'll work better and you'll see that, yeah, but we need the date and the cost. It's like, okay, it's a waterfall. It's complicated. I mean, at the end, it might look like it, but it would be easier if they get on board and trust that the system will provide value to them. Right. Now, that is the dilemma of modern development is exactly that. Very cool. I mean, because there are teams that maybe will not deliver that value. So I understand that this is not, I mean, they could go on and on forever. So they want to have something like, hey, you said you would have this and you don't have it. Well, that's why I go back to what I said. It's great to have citizen developers in there. It's like, hey, this is working or we get 80% of what we need here. Here's what they did. You might then go in there and say, well, yeah, but it's not, from a governance standpoint, you're not compliant with these things that you need. It's unsecured in these ways, but you understand what they're trying to do and then can re-architect or modify and go from there. Or thoughtful and scratch, we just have to scrap entirely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but even scrapping it entirely, but you have an idea of what there is the expected behavior, what they need. Yeah, that is true. That is true. Yeah. I mean, I've seen all possibilities already. Like some companies, it's free for all. Everybody do whatever they feel like. Some other companies, they have like a reporting department. Nobody gets hands on the data outside that department. You have all the possibilities out there and well, it's good to get used to them. Yeah. Well, again, that's why I said it feels so much like, that's where I started with my career. It felt like that. It was a bit of the wild west. We're trying to do more with that, but where we'd have outside of consultants and be like, want to go and re-architect. We're like, yeah, that's fine, but we're live, we're in production. So we want to modify, we want to improve it. We want to build the newer model that's more secure and all those things, but we can't stop what we're doing today. Ooh. Okay. Anyway, so yeah, that was a different world. That was a long time ago. I'm old, but that's all. Well, anything else that you're really passionate about right now, we've just had to inspire, you know, there's a bunch of product announcements, a bunch of things that happen out of that. Anything that like has stood out to you that you're really passionate about? New developments. I don't know. I'm, you know, one of my two topics that are more like, that people associate with me more and more is like, one is calculation groups, which is, which I think there's something coming up from what I've seen on Twitter. So we'll see what happens if they finally arrive in the desktop or what. And then there's a, well, the C sharp scripts for a tabular editor. They finally have like some intelligence built in the tabular editor three and and then hopefully like custom classes will be stored easily soon. We'll see how that works as well. And yeah, I don't know. I just, I like to promote these two worlds and which combine quite a lot. And I've been signing up for presentations like in Spanish, English, and Japanese, which I signed up yesterday for two presentations, which I still haven't figured out how I will do them. I did one last year in December. And that was very, very good in a way because I used to do them like in a PowerPoint and then jumping into the Power BI desktop and showing something back and forth. But the Japanese people, there's something that they like very much. And that is something that is easy to understand, which probably everybody likes, but Japanese people like it more, I think. If somebody says to your presentation, that was easy to understand. You should take that with the most valuable thing ever. I mean, they love that. So not that mine was like that, but in the rehearsal process, which was very kindly offered by one of who is now in the cut team, so Aikisui, and then one of the group organizers there in Japan, it was clear that it was not easy to understand what my approach was. And then I really decided to redesign the whole presentation and do it all inside Power BI desktop. Because he was like, okay, you mean that? Okay, show me. And then boom, I have to like, oh. So I can show people directly in Power BI desktop. It was a pain to set up because you have to set up so many bookmarks and stuff and so on. But after that, you put that bookmark visor thing, then would you just click next, next, next, next? And you can do sort of a Power BI and interact with all of the Power BI, not just the report, but also you can show people how's the definition of the measure or how the table looks like. And then jump into our tabular editor and show back and forth. And I think that was a big improvement to my presentation. So I'm very glad I did that. We'll see how these next presentations go. One is an introduction to C-sharp scripts. And the other one is about data validation in Power BI, which is like something I've come back to a few times. And then I put all the topics together in one presentation. So things that you can check about your data. I mean, you should not blindly trust your data. So something might be wrong. And if you're lucky, it will break your loading process. But you should be sure. I mean, that it loads, but also if something left out because of errors, also about the referential integrity, do you have things missing on your dimensions? And then the other one is like business logic. I mean, maybe there's a field that can have two values and then suddenly the third value appears. I mean, most of the cases, maybe you don't need all those checked. But if you need them, how should you go about it? And then there's some scripts that make most of this work easy. And to have like some summary and then some dynamic button. And these I'll be showing as well in, I'll go live in Sweden this year. I'll be traveling there on my own with my family. We'll just like the end of the summer. And are all these primarily community events like the Japan events? The Japan is a data platform event. Yeah, I think it's a bit bigger than the regular user group thing. Yeah. And the one in Sweden is the data Saturdays. So I really don't know much, but I think it'd be larger than the user group. Kind of the theme of the other events. Yeah. I don't know. I had a friend that was like, okay, I'll send a session if I get accepted, I'll go visit her. Yeah. So that's what we'll do. That's another thing for people that are wanting to kind of get into this speaking and sharing more like the community. It's like user groups are really easy to go and do. Everybody like everybody's always looking for speakers. There's a lot of opportunities for brand new people, even if you've never done a presentation before. But some of these larger events and there was like SQL Saturday and SharePoint Saturday. Now community days and there's all versions of those all over the place as well that people can get into depending on your focus area. There's Azure events that are happening all the time. There's a lot of ways that you can go and if you want to share the project that you're working on at work that you're proud of and it doesn't mean you're an expert in all things, but here's what we did. Here's how we did it. Here's how we answer this issue and share that. It's a great way to get started. Yeah. Actually, when I started, I did that first one without thinking much and probably I would come and then later I realized that there's reasons and events call it new stars of data or something like this, which is especially focused on new speakers. But then because I had already presented, it was like not eligible anymore. It was like, okay, whatever. Just roll on with the next day, man. But you need really to be careful because sometimes you sign up for too many things and then you end up stress out for something that is completely volunteer. It doesn't make any sense. It's the FOMO. It's the fear of missing out. A lot of people get that. I can proudly say that for the most part, I do not have FOMO anymore. That's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. You have to just let go and you don't need to be everywhere and do everything. But yeah. Well, very cool. Well, Bernard, it's really great to meet you. I hope to see you more than virtually at some point and get over to your part of the world. So we'll keep in touch. But thanks for participating in this series and for folks that want to get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you via social or otherwise? Yeah, I would say Twitter is a great place to find me. So Agulio Bernard. And otherwise, LinkedIn is also there. And I do even have my email on my MVP page. So feel free to contact, especially if it's about calculation groups and C-sharp scripts. Of course. All right. Well, hey, really appreciate your time. Thank you.