What have I been up to since I was furloughed?

So April 2020 has been an interesting month for me personally, the project I was doing at work got paused due to the customer not being able to support remote working, work had nothing in the pipeline for me to do so I got furloughed, wow talk about being kicked in the nuts, but rather than complain, let’s use this opportunity to learn.

Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me, they know who they are and it’s hugely appreciated.

If you know me then you know that I am always learning, always setting myself goals for the months ahead and so I decided to not write blog posts or produce content for the time I’m furloughed and spend it learning. If I had to write down everything I wanted to learn and read about it would turn into a book itself.

So that being said I wanted to learn containers and GitHub Actions as the first 2 port of calls and fit in some extra community work in between that.

I have probably done more community work this month than in the past 3 or 4 combined and it been amazing – being able to work from home and just get on a call with folk wanting to learn something or getting on a call to help someone figure out an issue has been very sweet. Being able to moderate Michael Crump’s Twitch stream has been super cool, twitch is something I think has a very bright future.

Working from home (albeit not actually working) is amazing, its so much more productive than working in an office or out on-site at a customer.

The following is a list of just a few of the things I’ve accomplished this month, it doesn’t cover the hours, the calls, the number of times I had to change the schedule fo the gav event – would I change what I did if I had the month over – nope!.

• Global Azure Virtual 2020 – One of the organisers, website creation, speaker sign-ups, chasing people for content, updating the schedule. Also a moderator on the 3 day which was the Live Stream (9 hours).
• Moderator and participant in Michael Trumps Twitch Streams covering Azure app config, Live Share, GitHub Actions, WSL, and other more general fun topics.
• Spoke at the Belgium User Group – on Supercharging your Azure Learning as part of the Belgium Community Week
• Spoke at the Boston User Group – on Supercharging your Azure Learning.
• Time spent doing Pluralsight this month learning GitHub Actions.
• Completed Cloudskills course on – Docker Jumpstart.
• Microsoft Learn learning – 3 modules complete.
• Microsoft Products Groups (10 PGI’s)
• Mentoring several people with starting blogs, learning Hugo, exam study guides, and people looking for advice on how to become an MVP.
• Created a DP-300 Administering Relational Databases on Microsoft Azurestudy guide: – https://gregorsuttie.com/2020/04/19/azure-dp-300-study-guide/
• Spoke 1-1 with more a number of community people which a probably the best part of being off.

In May I plan to brush up on my SQL and PowerBI skills and looking forward to that, it’s been a few months since I touched either.

Still amazes me just how many great people I have spoken to this past month and it’s been a blast.