Today, I read Davy Brions latest post, “Most Valuable Professionals? Give me a break.” I have to admit that I was a little bit saddened by Davy’s experiences with the MVP program and its representatives in Belgium, because my view of the MVP program has almost always been positive.
I know that the program is notorious for its obscure election process, and I followed Rob Eisenberg’s hazzle back in January, yet I am confident that the MVP program is a good thing – because all the MVPs here in Denmark that I know of are genuinely cool people, who are working hard on interesting projects, and who still manage to find time and energy to spread good vibes about technology that widens everybody’s horizon. I simply do not know any MVPs that are not awesome technologists!
Another thing is that I was recently given the MVP award – and I can honestly say that I do NOT scratch Microsoft’s back unmerited in any way!
I am pretty invested in the open source .NET world, and when I give talks, I talk about stuff like Castle Windsor, MongoDB, and NServiceBus. And personally, I am much more an indie-underground-micro-framework-kind-of-guy, than I am an enterprisey blessed-by-Microsoft-kind-of-guy, even though I tend to work in enterprisey environments. I just happen to enjoy working with C# and the .NET stack, both professionally and in my spare time, and I guess that’s what shows when I communicate with people about software development.
What I am saying is this: The fact that I get an MVP award can only be a sign that Microsoft (at least in some regions) actually want to encourage developers to be active and contribute to the .NET communities in various ways, even though they’re not necessarily praising Microsoft at every occasion. I guess Microsoft (still: at least in some regions) realize that active software developers are good for the .NET ecosystem as a whole, and in my eyes that’s what the MVP program is about.
I guess I just wanted to chime in with a positive MVP story 🙂