A couple days ago I woke to receive this in my inbox:
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Internet Explorer technical communities during the past year.
It’s a huge honor for me to be called a Microsoft MVP and a special thanks goes to Carter Rabasa of the IE9 team for my initial nomination. Since I started coding back in 2003, I’ve followed and got inspiration from heavy hitters like Rick Strahl, Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman and Jon Skeet, who have all held the MVP award, and it’s awesome to be able to join them. Here’s what Microsoft’s MVP site says about what an MVP is:
MVPs make exceptional contributions to technical communities, sharing their passion, knowledge, and know-how. Meanwhile, because MVPs hear the opinions and needs of many others in the technical community, they are well-placed to share highly focused feedback with Microsoft.
MVPs are independent experts who are offered a close connection with people at Microsoft. To acknowledge MVPs’ leadership and provide a platform to help support their efforts, Microsoft often gives MVPs early access to Microsoft products, as well as the opportunity to pass on their highly targeted feedback and recommendations about product design, development, and support.
I wasn’t really expecting the award. I haven’t been pursuing any kind of award, and never expected to get it once I was nominated. I didn’t really think that I had that much influence in the community. Hopefully the MVP award will give me a larger platform to raise awareness for things I’m passionate about. Particularly, it’s always made me sad that all of the awesome web developer tools have been for Firefox, while the most popular browser and the minimum requirement for every web project is IE. Firefox “fixed” all my shoddy coding and had FireBug and then when I looked at the site in IE when I (thought) I was done, it would look horrible. In 2011, now IE has awesome developer tools, but it’s not well known (especially in the developer community) the importance of testing in IE early. Hopefully my MVP status will help me communicate to fellow developers more about the new tools that are available in IE and give feedback to the IE team to make it better (P.S. everyone has the same level of feedback access to the MS teams via connect.microsoft.com).
So, if you want to see me in action, check out:
Happy New Year!