Awarded first time integration MVP

Awarded first time integration MVP

Let’s start this blogpost by someone else telling my story from October 1st & October 2nd, I’m happy to quote Sam Vanhoutte directly from our internal sharepoint:
“Imagine this. You get nominated for MVP, you have filled out all the community things you have done over the past months (blog posts, organizing gwab, speaking at events, helping out on forums and twitter…) and then you know the day is come where all new MVP’s get an e-mail in their mailbox.
And then you see other MVP’s (old and new) tweeting how happy and honored they are with their (re)new(ed) title. And you congratulate them and F5 your own mailbox. And nothing happens, no new e-mails. You feel disappointed, but you know that you just have to continue and hope for the new quarter in a few months.
You settle with it and then you have to do some banking business. You expect an e-mail from that online banking system and you don’t get it. You watch the spam folder and there you don’t find the banking e-mail. No, you find following e-mail from the MVP program to let you know that you have been awarded the MVP title for the Integration competence. Oh the suspense!”

The day after

This award really came as a surprise for me, not because I discovered it way too late.
I believe this reward is more than what I currently deserve. But nevertheless it gives me that extra motivation to work even harder to make an impact on the current Integration community.

So, where did it all start?

I guess it all started about 5 years ago when I joined this amazing company. They gave me all the necessary opportunities to develop myself on a professional and personal level.
So actually a big thank you goes out to Codit for giving me all the support and possibilities that were necessary to achieve this award.
When it comes to community activities, I started being active in the community about 2 years. Blogging on a regular base and joining local User Groups and MeetUps.
This year I had the opportunity to help organize a GWAB location in cooperation with AZUG.be, they also gave me the chance to do my first community sessions. Couple of months later I did my first session for the local BizTalk User Group (BTUG).
I also continued blogging on a regular level and answering questions on the BizTalk MSDN forum.

What now?

Like I said in the start of this post, this award gives me that extra motivation to continue what I’m doing and actually kick it up a notch.
To end this post I would like to thank some people for giving me the insight and opportunities in this amazing community! (In no particular order): Sam Vanhoutte, Tom Kerkhove, Pieter Vandenheede, Mike Martin, Maarten Balliauw, Yves Goeleven, Kristof Rennen, BTUG.be and AZUG.

Cheers,
Glenn Colpaert