(This post is kinda rambly)
Wow! I’m lucky enough to have been re-awarded the Microsoft Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management MVP award for the 9th straight year. This is never something that I expect to happen. Instead, I just continue to try and give back to the ALM community more and more every year, and so far I’ve managed to maintain my MVP status.
9 years. Had you told me 9 years ago that I would still be an ALM MVP, I would probably have told you that won’t happen. There are so many good people out there, working in the ALM community space, that deserve this award just as much as me, as not more. Sometimes I still find it surreal.
10 years ago, I didn’t even know what the MVP program was. But I met Rob Caron and Korby Parnell at Tech Ed 2004, and they were wanting people to start talking about this new product coming out, called Team System. So I started blogging about it (wow, http://teamsystemrocks.blogspot.com is still around!). And a year later, in 2005, I received notification that I had been awarded an MVP in Team System. My first question was: what’s an MVP? 
I then moved on to my own domain, http://teamsystemrocks.com, where I continued to blog for many years. When the Team System brand name was dropped, I also started blogging at https://almrocks.com, which is where I currently reside.
Being an MVP has opened so many doors for me. It has lead me to book deals (currently working on my 4th technical book). It has led to job opportunities, both full-time employment at Notion Solutions (now Imaginet), as well as multiple part-time jobs, including a regular gig as a columnist at VisualStudioMagazine.com. I’ve gotten to travel the world and talk about ALM, at both Tech Ed and Tech Ed Europe.
But most importantly, it has led me to meet some of the smartest, most incredible people who I am happy to call not just colleagues, but close personal friends.
And in a way, I’m back where I started. When I first received my MVP, I was blogging and evangelizing the Microsoft ALM stack on my own time. Then I worked for an ALM company for a while. And now I’m back to doing it on my own time, because I love it. And honestly, that is one of the best reasons to be able to keep my MVP, because I love the product and space, and I want to make sure everyone knows what they can do with it.
I’m looking forward to what this year brings as far as ALM and Microsoft go. And I’m also looking forward to trying to find new ways to reach out to developers, to help them understand what all they can accomplish with Visual Studio and TFS.
Its with a sad heart though, that I let the teamsystemrocks.com domain disappear into the wind. But it is time. Long Live Team System!
