Farewell Most Valuable Professional Status
For the last three years, I was honored to receive a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. This award has given me access to team members iniside of Microsoft, to tools and software and most importantly, to the global community of MVPs. This year, however, I have decided not to apply for renewal as a MVP.
For years, I have traveled around giving talks on development technologies, methodologies and practices at user groups and conferences. It was very gratifying to be recognized for these efforts even once. The fact that the recognition was renewed twice was surprising, to me at least. I have no plans to stop doing what I’ve been doing. I continue to receive positive feedback from receptive audiences, and I enjoy meeting new people at my talks.
I am not disenchanted with the MVP program. It has it’s flaws, but in general, I find it to be a beneficial program for the technology community using Microsoft products. The vast majority of MVPs that I know are intelligent, dedicated, generous people of high character. The few exceptions do not negate the contributions of these fine people.
My decision not to seek renewal springs from my own, internal value barometer. As I contemplated compiling a list of my contributions over the past year, I asked myself why I wanted to be renewed. I realized that the only reasons I had to seek a renewed MVP award was to stroke my ego, and receive free stuff. My ego is stroked by the implied status of the MVP award and as a MVP, I recieve a full MSDN subscription, and free licenses for many tools from third party vendors.
While status and free stuff are nice, they aren’t reason enough for me to continue to pursue a MVP award. The truth is, I haven’t been particularly engaged as a MVP over the past year. I did not attend the MVP summit in 2011. I have not been contributing to, or even reading the insider mailing lists that I’m subscribed to. I haven’t been delivering feedback to my product team in any way.
Given my level of disengagement with the program and my admittedly shallow motivations, I decided it would be disengenuous to re-apply. I may frequently be a f**k-up, but I doubt people that truly know me would accuse me of being a phony.
Thanks to everyone that helped get me into the MVP program. Thank you to everyone at Microsoft that keeps the MVP program running. Thank you to the Visual C# team for valuing what I do. I hope that someone coming up in the community can take my spot in the MVP program and benefit as much as I have from the opportunities that it provides.
++Alan
Virginia User Group Tour
This week, I’m embarking on a three city tour of Virginia sharing my ideas on the parallels between writing and software development. Below are links to the meeting details as well as the abstract and slide deck:
Does Your Code Tell A Story
Software developers are writers. Our medium is text. What can we learn about writing code by studying the principles of good story writing? Frequently in software development, we solve a problem, check in the code and release it. Unfortunately, this means we have released a first draft of the solution. One of the main lessons of writing workshops and classes is to write in small chunks and revise ruthlessly. By releasing our first drafts, we increase the maintenance cast of our application because it is harder to understand the initial intent of the solution. In this session, we will explore concepts from writing such as small assignments, bad first drafts, and telling the truth as they apply to the craft of software development.
View more presentations from Alan Stevens.
See y’all in The Commonwealth,
++Alan
Coding In Public Slides and Video
The Ohio user group tour last week was a success from my perspective. I had a blast sharing some ideas and talking to friends. The feedback that I received was very positive as well.
I put the slides on SlideShare here.
I am especially pleased that Scott Walker took the time to record video of my talk in Columbus,OH. The video is embedded below. Enjoy!
Alan Stevens – Coding In Public from Scott Walker on Vimeo.
Cheers,
++Alan
