I've been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for 2026-2027. That makes it my tenth year in the program.
The first award came in 2017. A decade later the email still lands the same way — gratitude for the recognition, and knowing the Microsoft product teams value the work I'm putting out there for the community.
I'll admit I'm doubly excited this year. Ten years earns the blue puck, and it goes on top of the stack.
Ten Years, Briefly
Back then my contributions were blog posts, forum answers, and SharePoint Saturdays. Now it's running the platform people use to find community events worldwide, running events across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mentoring, and still writing about the problems I hit at work.
What the Award Is Worth
Two things: access and trust.
Access is a direct line to the product teams — feedback that lands somewhere, and seeing where the platform is heading before it ships. That makes my advice better.
Trust is the other half. People are more confident an event is worth their time when MVPs are running it. That brings in speakers, sponsors, and attendees.
This Past Year
Community Days and MGCI
Much the same as last year, which is the point — this work is steady, not flashy. I'm still on the board and still running the Tech and Tools group behind CommunityDays.org.
The difference is that I've spent more of the year building that group out than building things myself. Getting other people to contribute, and giving them room to own the work, gets more done than anything I could ship alone.
I'm also still in the room with other event organizers — the office hours, the training sessions, the back-channel questions from someone running their first event. That's where a lot of the useful work actually happens.
Events in the Tri-State Area
I'm still running events across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — the venue, the sponsors, the coffee order, and a room filling up with people who took a Friday out of their week to learn something. That part hasn't changed in ten years.
This year that meant Experts Live US in October, M365 Philly in May, the AI Community Conference in New York in June, and M365 Community Days NYC at the end of July. Next up is the AI Community Conference in New Jersey on September 25th.
A Team, and a Non-Profit
The bigger change is that I'm not doing it alone. A real team has formed around these events — people who show up every time and own their piece of it. It stopped being something I organize and became something we organize.
The NYC crew this year: Rajaniesh Kaushikk, Manpreet Singh, Peter Ward, Pooja Rajpal, Jason Rivera, Amie Seisay, Claire Hynes, Pradeep Raja, Sucheta Gawade, Diego Domingos da Silva, Himanshu Goil, and Stacy Burris.
This year we formed a non-profit, Ctrl-Alt-Learn, to sit behind it — cofounded with Amie Seisay and Jason Rivera. Sponsorship money now goes somewhere accountable, the paperwork is out of my personal accounts, and the events can outlast any one of us. That last part is why we did it. Community work is fragile when it runs on one person's calendar.
Helping Other People Get There
The part I'm proudest of is the conversations.
Someone wants to speak but doesn't think they have anything worth saying. Someone's stuck in a role and can't see the next step. Someone new doesn't know which events matter or who to talk to. I've been on the other side of all three, and an honest answer is worth more than anything I could write.
A few of those people have gone on to earn the MVP award themselves. They earned it — the work was theirs. But knowing where to put your energy and who to meet shortens a path that took me years to find. Watching someone get that email beats getting my own.
Thank You
To Microsoft, to the program managers who support us, and to everyone who has organized alongside me, spoken at an event, or just said thanks — thank you. Ten years happened because of you.
If you're thinking about contributing, start small. Pick one:
- Volunteer at an event near you
- Post or answer a question in an online forum
- Join one of the many Microsoft community calls
- Contribute to one of the many open source projects in the Microsoft space
That's how all of us started.
