The total number of MVP-awarded team members in the Valo Team increased to eight as Antti Koskela, Valo’s Software Architect, received the award from Microsoft beginning of November 2019.
Antti joined Valo in 2016 after first working for Blue Meteorite, the company behind Valo. Since then, he has worked for Valo in 3 different countries doing software development, technical partner support and marketing, all the while attending quite a few events around the world.
On the 1st of November 2019, he got a surprise email from Microsoft: he was awarded Microsoft MVP for Office Development!
I’m still flabbergasted, to tell you the truth – but of course it feels great to get this recognition from Microsoft. The way Microsoft encourages active community participation is nothing short of awesome!
Microsoft MVP Award is a recognition given by Microsoft to individuals for their contribution and leadership in the partner community.
In addition to Antti’s job at Valo, he is an active technology blogger, event speaker, and social media commentator and contributes to the open-source initiatives Microsoft has going on.
His blog, “#SharePointProblems” reached a half a million visitor threshold this year. “I document all the weird and exotic workarounds I come across in my daily work or hobby projects! In some of the articles there’s an active discussion going on in the comments section.”
When it comes to the process of becoming an MVP, it is not only about participating in community events but being also active contributor online!
Teamwork is the key to success
Valo is a team packed with competence, including several other MVPs. Furthermore, Valo Partner network consists of over 250 SharePoint & O365 specialist firms. Therefore, it is a good place to grow competences and learn together.
“Despite growing quickly, the team is very tight-knit and not only do we work together, but we also spend a lot of time together on the road at different events, and even collaborate on projects outside work. Since moving first to the USA in 2017, and then to Canada in 2018, I’ve worked with our North American MVPs (Product Evangelist Vlad Catrinescu and Product Lead Sébastien Levert) on an almost daily basis, and this has continued after my move back to Finland.”, Antti says about working in the Valo team.
MVP Celebrations
The first MVP award is definitely an accomplishment worth celebrating. “To celebrate, my wife already took me to the best restaurant in town – there’s about 3 to choose from, as I recently moved back from Canada to Finland, and settled in a small, fairly rural community”, he jokes.
And Antti would not be Antti unless a part of the celebration ceremony would not contain some serious geeking: “I will celebrate by jumping back on a Blazor project and some Azure Functions that I have been working on recently. It should be a lot of fun – if nothing else, working with cutting edge technologies means there’s a lot of new topics for blog posts coming up. I think I’ll also post a celebratory blog post sometime later this week!”
On behalf of myself and the entire Valo Team: congratulations for the MVP award, Antti!
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