Gaurav Mantri's Personal Blog.

Got My MVP Award And Things I Did (I Think) To Get This Award

What a way to start new year! Just got the following in my email:

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This is the 3rd year I got this award. I’m excited, honored, humbled and privileged to be awarded as an MVP and especially proud to be the part of Windows Azure MVP group. Thank you Microsoft!!!

Things I Did

Here’s what I think I did last year to be deemed worthy of receiving this award. Folks who aspire to become an MVP can think of this as partial checklist of things they could do to to achieve this award.

Community Forums Participation

I’m quite active on community forums. There’re two forums where I actively participate: MSDN Forums and StackOverflow. I try and contribute there to the best of my abilities. It’s not that I always provide correct answers but I try. Sometimes I end up providing completely incorrect answers but that’s OK. The community takes care of that. It also provided me an opportunity to learn something new everyday.

I think community forums participation could be the 1st step one needs to take to become an MVP.

Blogging

Last year, I started my personal blog (this one duh!!! :)) and wrote a number of blog posts about Windows Azure, Amazon and other things. Blogging to me is a wonderful platform to share your knowledge with rest of the world. I blogged about the stuff I knew and thought others might be interested in knowing. Sometimes I blogged about the stuff I learned and thought others might be interested in learning the same. The idea is to share your knowledge. Again your knowledge may be incorrect or limited but folks who will visit your blog will correct you so don’t feel shy and just write and share your knowledge.

Things I Didn’t Do

There’re some of the things I didn’t do which other MVPs I know of did. Not sure if I get a chance to do it this year, but if I do get a chance I will do it.

Community Events

This is one thing I didn’t do last year. A lame excuse I always give for this is that “I work in a Non-IT city”. But I think I need to work on that. One could start a local user group and get like minded technology folks to come and participate in that group or speak at user groups in various cities or other community events. Remember that your goal is to share your knowledge.

Contribution to Open Source Community

This is another thing I didn’t do last year. If you look on CodePlex, GitHub, SourceForge and many other sites you will find folks contributing a number of open source software. They include very elegant frameworks, libraries, applications and even simple how-to-do-it kind of applications and all of them are done in the spirit of helping the community. One could start their own project or even start contributing to an existing project based on her/his interest. Not only it would help the community but also improves the contributor’s programming skills.

Summary

I would like to extend my thanks to Microsoft for first having a program like MVP and considering me worthy of this award. I’m really grateful.

The key to become an MVP is to share your knowledge no matter how you share it.

To a wonderful 2013!!!


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