I’m now an MVP! How cool is that?!

So Sunday morning of a the long weekend just gone… I wake up, grab my phone, and do the usual – have a quick glance at Twitter notifications, ignore the Facebook notifications and then open my email.

And there it was. The email I’d totally forgotten I was waiting for:

“Congratulations 2016 Microsoft MVP!”

ZOMG! I’ve been awarded an MVP in Cloud & Datacenter Management – I’ve been waiting DAYS for my profile to go live before publishing this post! (The self-control involved…so hard!)

I’m quite proud to say I’m one of only 12 people in Australia & New Zealand to currently hold this award…which is just mind-blowing. It’s an absolutely amazing feeling to be awarded something like this simply for sharing knowledge and loving being a part of this technical community. I honestly never saw myself on par with some of the people I now share this award with.

So what does this actually mean? I need to speak up more (as if I don’t do that already :P), so I’m hoping to get to a few more conferences and events in the next 12 months. I’m hoping to write a few more blog posts and keep contributing to those communities I’m a part of…as well as (hopefully) join a few others that might welcome me!

If you’re just starting out in tech, or you’ve been in doing it for a while and wonder what it takes to get an award like this? Talk to people, help those you can, write things down and share it as far and wide as possible, be open to new opportunities, get out of your comfort zone and do something you thought you never would – if you’d told me 5 years ago that I’d be speaking at conferences, I’d have laughed at you!

I also wanted to say a huge thank you to the people who’ve helped me along the way to getting this far – Macca & Jeffa, for believing in me and pushing me forward to talk at Ignite last year; my amazing friends, who are my first audience for pretty much everything I do; the people I speak to online in Slack & on Reddit, some of whom seem to find the information I’m sharing to be useful; all the people who read my blog and came to my talk at Ignite last year (or have used the MS Ignite NZ session builder and are going to come along and see me this year!); and lastly, my Twitter followers, for continuing to follow me and putting up with my sysadmin snarkiness! (with Lego, cat pictures and a touch of sweariness thrown in for good measure :P)

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