Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

I read the email twice before it actually landed. Then a third time, just to be sure I wasn’t misreading a rejection as an acceptance out of sheer wishful thinking. I wasn’t. I’d been accepted as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Copilot Studio and Power Apps.

If you’d told me a few years ago that this is where the late nights writing up a debugging session, the half-finished tools I published anyway, and the arguments I picked in comment threads would lead, I’m not sure I’d have believed you. But that’s the honest shape of it. This wasn’t a plan. It was a habit of showing up that, somewhere along the way, started to matter to other people too.

Here’s the thing people get wrong about the MVP program: it’s not a Microsoft job, and it’s not a certification you study for. Nobody hands you a syllabus. What it actually recognizes is something much less tidy — people who keep showing up for a community without being paid to, who share what they know even when it makes them look wrong, and who care enough to push back when something doesn’t sit right.

Looking back at what actually got me here, it wasn’t one big thing. It was a pile of small, repeated ones:

• Writing down what worked and, just as often, what quietly broke in Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and AI-assisted development
• Publishing the mistakes and the architectural dead ends alongside the wins, on the theory that someone else’s week of debugging is worth more than my pride
• Building the Power Apps MCP Server because I needed it myself, and figuring the community probably did too
• Sticking around in conversations about where these platforms are heading, even the uncomfortable ones about how to build responsibly with AI

What the MVP title changes is less about validation and more about access — earlier looks at new features, more direct lines to the people building the product, a seat at tables where these platforms’ direction actually gets decided. It’s less a trophy and more a bigger microphone.

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None of this happened overnight, and it definitely didn’t happen on purpose in the way a straight line implies. I’d been in the Power Platform world for years before anything about my work stood out. What actually shifted things was narrower and stranger than “working harder” — I got obsessed with the mechanics of AI-assisted development. Not the demos, the plumbing: how you structure a codebase, write custom instructions, design agents, so that AI genuinely makes you faster instead of just making you feel faster.

Pulling on that thread led everywhere. Articles on GitHub Copilot CLI. Claude Skills. Dataverse Skills. AI-powered canvas apps. Every pitfall of agentic development I tripped over, I wrote up instead of quietly fixing and moving on. That obsession became the Power Apps MCP Server and the integrations that followed. And somewhere in the middle of all that writing and building, I started running into other people wrestling with the exact same problems — and learning as much from them as anything I’d figured out on my own.

If I’m honest about where the credit belongs, it’s not really mine. It’s a reflection of that community. Every article started as someone’s question. Every tool started as someone’s problem. I just happened to be the one writing it down.

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Nothing about the blog changes at its core. I’m still writing the same technical articles, still building with Power Platform and AI, still shipping the same kind of scrappy, useful tools. The mission hasn’t moved: practical guidance for the developers and architects actually trying to make these platforms work, not marketing copy dressed up as a tutorial.

What does shift, quietly, behind the scenes:

• Earlier access to features and docs — meaning I can write about what’s coming before it ships, and flag problems before they land on someone’s production environment
• A closer line to the product teams — meaning feedback on what’s working and what isn’t actually reaches someone who can act on it
• A better position to advocate — meaning when something in the platform is broken or missing, I have a more direct way to push on it than shouting into a support ticket

The net effect, I hope, is content and tools that are just a little more informed than before.

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I don’t think recognition like this happens in isolation, no matter how it’s framed in an announcement email. This one is built on people, plainly:

• Everyone who read an article, actually tried an integration, told me when a take didn’t land, or asked the question that forced me to explain something better than I had
• The other builders and architects in the Power Platform and AI spaces who were generous enough to share their thinking, their code, and yes, their mistakes too
• The Microsoft teams who took community feedback seriously enough to actually ship something because of it
• The wider, messier push toward making enterprise development more accessible and more AI-native — a project none of us have fully figured out yet, myself included

I mean it when I say I’m grateful. This isn’t the kind of thing you get to alone.

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If you’ve been reading along, nothing about the blog’s texture is going to change: deep dives into how things actually work, honest accounts of where the tools fall short, and patterns you can actually use to build at scale with AI.

A few threads I keep pulling on and plan to keep pulling on:

• How agentic patterns are quietly reshaping enterprise development, and what that means for governance, cost, and risk once the novelty wears off
• How to build with AI without racking up technical debt or locking yourself into one vendor’s roadmap
• The patterns that let small teams punch well above their weight once their AI tooling is actually dialed in
• Where Power Platform and code-first approaches genuinely diverge, and where the “it depends” answer is actually true

The letters after my name are nice. But they’re not the point — they’re just a slightly louder platform to keep doing the thing that got me here: writing honestly about hard problems, and helping other people solve theirs a little faster than I solved mine.

Thanks for reading this far, and for being part of however this next chapter goes.