Microsoft MVP in AI for the 8th Year Running

Microsoft awarded me the Most Valuable Professional Award for the 8th year in a row.

The disk was shipped and each year it still means something. I don’t take it for granted.

Eight years is long enough that I can look back at my first nomination, the one that got rejected, and I see how much the work I’ve been doing has changed.

Back then it was Cognitive Services demos and Twitter API integrations.

This year it’s RAG pipelines throwing silent 500s at 2am and debugging why an Azure WebJob dies with no error in the logs.

Different problems, same habit: build it, write down what I learned, ship the write-up.

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What Last Year Looked like

It’s easy to let an MVP renewal turn into a highlight reel. I’d rather it be an honest inventory, because that’s what feeds into what I do differently next year.

Last year looked like:

• Contracting and consulting
• Engineering production APIs, RAG pipelines, multi-tool MCP servers
• unglamorous debugging sessions that never makes it into a conference talk -chunking bugs, Elasticsearch KNN weirdness, corpus drift nobody notices until search results start lying to you.
• creating new AI courses on Pluralsight
• shipping consistently on this blog, mostly RAG lessons, Claude Code usage, and Microsoft Agent Framework patterns
• awarded Top 50 Global Thought Leader spot in Agentic AI by Thinkers360
• reaching 3,500 learners each month looking to upskill with AI

None of this has been a straight line. It’s a year of contracting, consulting, writing, and shipping tools that solve problems I had, then writing up what broke along the way.

That’s always been the pattern that’s kept the MVP renewal coming, not chasing the award, just doing the work and being loud enough about it that it’s visible.

The MVP award is the icing on the cake for doing what I already love.

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What’s Different This Time Round

These last 5 years have been some of the most exciting in my 20+ year career.

Recently it’s been MCP servers, agentic patterns, and a much noisier, faster-moving AI ecosystem where half of what you write about is out of date within a quarter.

RAG in particular has gone from “nice demo” to “here’s why your ingestion pipeline is quietly dropping data”.  I tend to think it’s this stuff people actually want to read because they’re likely hitting the same walls as myself.

If there’s a lesson from eight years of this, it’s that consistency beats intensity.

I’m not the loudest voice in the AI space and I’m not trying to be.

I turn up, learn something new, ship something about it, or explain how it broke, then I do it again the following week. Eight renewals later that’s still the whole strategy.

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Thankyou

To Microsoft, and to everyone who reads the blog, takes the courses, or gets in touch after a post -thank you. The recognition is appreciated. The conversations it starts or feedback I get from the community are the point.

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