Let’s celebrate the milestones you’ve hit this year!

Mid-Year Check-in prompt:

Celebrate the milestones and achievements you’ve reached this year. Share your successes, no matter how big or small, and acknowledge the hard work you’ve put into your journey!

Comments

[Matt Eland]

Biggest one I hit was Microsoft MVP in AI, which I'm still wowed about. There's other ones too like agreeing to my first book and my first online course (though that last one isn't in contract yet)

[Philip John Basile]

freaking awesome you’re an MVP!!

[BekahHW]

That’s amazing!!!! Congrats 🎉

[Philip John Basile]

How do you become a Microsoft mvp? I’m setting that as a goal.

[Matt Eland]

MVP is a category that Microsoft keeps intentionally a bit vague about what is and isn't a MVP, but in a nutshell to be an MVP you must:

• Become very skilled in a few key areas related to MVP focus areas, such as AI, Azure, or Developer Technologies to the point where the larger community would agree with your skill in this area
• Passionately share about these areas of interest in your community
• Continually learn more things
• Continually share the new things you learn
• Get nominated by a current MVP or full-time Microsoft employee
• Enter in your public contributions over the last calendar year in the focus areas of your choosing, with viable metrics and verifiable URLs to events, articles, talks, etc. you had a hand in.
• Microsoft will internally review it and ask multiple people in that area internally to approve or decline
• You'll wait a long time (6 months for me after nomination) and then hear back on if you got it or if you didn't

I was really good at .NET 10 or 15 years ago when I first heard about the MVP program, and I thought "Hey, I've been doing this since the beginning and I'm really good, I should be an MVP", but it's more about community activity, community leadership, mentoring, and making an impact in a focused area, which I didn't start doing until around 2019 or so. 2020 I maybe could have made MVP, but I didn't truly step up my contributions to higher levels until 2022 or so, which is when I got that nomination.

The program is also reviewed every year, so I'll be up for renewal next summer while most of my friends in the MVP program will find out on July 6th if they were renewed for another year.

Hope this helps!

[Philip John Basile]

oh wow this is really useful! you should make this into a post!

[David Sugar]

Getting netmouth released as part of the Babylon project, and in doing so being able to further articulate the vision of a new kind of FOSS phone / home automation system as expressed in Coventry. This is one the first things I had been able to accomplish since learning to adapt to loss of eyesight.

[Philip John Basile]

Doing this now professionally for 25 years since I was a teen in college!

[BekahHW]

That's amazing!