be brave enough to suck at something new

Tis the season where we all look back to reflect what happened in the year, what we achieved, where we grew and where we helped others. At the beginning of this year, I told myself to be brave enough to suck at something new, which meant to me that I wanted to make more courages decisions - what to learn, what to build, what to dare. Turns out, that this was a good approach for me.

Instead of listing now each and every little thing I did, (well this ain’t the MVP community contribution list that I STILL need to update 😇), I’d rather like to emphasize a few initiatives that are near and dear to my heart - and that consumed not only a lot of my time but also of my mental capacity. Like a lot of us, I felt affected (yet another year) by the global world is on fire situation.

Open Source

Giving back to community balances this feeling, it lifts me up to see others thrive and I find joy and calm in collaborating with community for a greater good. This is why open-source became so important to me.

Microsoft 365 PnP

In December 2020, I joined the Microsoft 365 PnP team, which is ‘a virtual team consisting of Microsoft employees and community members focused on helping the community make the best of Microsoft products’. We help others to extend Microsoft 365 with tools, guidance, community calls and lots of initiatives. If you never heard about it, its worth checking it out.

In January 2021 I launched the Microsoft 365 PnP community blog, where everyone can share their knowledge about building things with Microsoft 365. This hub is also the home for community call recordings, the Microsoft 365 Developer podcast, and the PnP Weekly podcast. As of today, we managed to publish almost 1 article for each day. I’ve even been rewarded as MVP of the month April 😁 for this initiative. But please stay tuned -more exciting things here will happen in early 2022 🎉

Also, I am part of the Sharing is Caring initiative, which aims to make it easier for new contributors to find their way into our open source projects. We run a lot of sessions, on how to help with code and documentation, established a buddy system for new presenters in community calls and even run Office hours to help everyone achieve more together. I like to say a big thanks to the entire team

ProvisionGenie

Throughout the entire year, I’ve been working together with Carmen Ysewijn on our open-source Microsoft Teams provisioning engine called ProvisionGenie. We got quite some attention and are pretty happy with it, but like any other application: it’s never finished and there is always work to do. Huge 🧞💜 thanks to our all-time supporter and Chief Debugging Expert Yannick Reekmans

even more open-source

• • Wassim Chegham invited me to consult the team during the Microsoft Global Hackathon - and WE WON 🎉🎉🎉
• • I participated in the Hackathon held at SouthCoastSummit with my amazing team mates Carmen Ysewijn, Lee Ford, Michael Roth, Tomasz Poszytek and Yannick Reekmans - read about it here
• • In the beginning of the year, Eddie Jaoude asked me to join his #Eddiehub guild and to participate in the Major League Hacking Hackathon - and guess what? We won!
• • I worked with Marc Duiker on his awesome initiative Azure Functions University - this will be an ongoing effort in 2022 as well

Conferences

I know, most of us stayed at home for yet another year, but I was very fortunate to be able to attend and speak at two in-person events:

At SouthCoastSummit I spoke together with Yannick Reekmans about “FusionDev - hello from the other side”, which reflected our thoughts about makers and developers needing to join forces. Although totally overwhelming (people!), we had a blast and I was truly happy to see lots of my friends again.

Later on in November, it was Collabsummit, the community conference that is so close to my heart. One more special thing was, that it took place in Duesseldorf, where I happen to live. I delivered a session on “Azure Managed Identity and Microsoft Graph”, attendees seemed to like it 😇

more learning and sharing

• • I published 36 blog posts on m365princess.com
• • I learned 100+ hours JavaScript but missed my goal of doing this for 100 consecutive days
• • I completed Harvard’s CS50 Introduction to Computer Science
• • I completed the 30 days of Postman challenge
• • I delivered countless online sessions (for real, I lost track)
• • As a special xmas present to myself, I passed the MS-600 exam - Microsoft 365 Developer Associate

What’s next?

Good question! I want to continue to learn and share and grow with all of you! If you have a cool idea in mind, please reach out! I am always happy to help!

Have a happy new year - hope to see you soon somewhere!