The email arrived this week: I have been accepted into the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program for the coming year, in DevOps. The award date is August 1, 2026.
I am genuinely happy about it, and I want to be clear about why, because the MVP award is one of those things that gets misread in both directions. It is not a certification. Nobody sits an exam. It is also not a job title, a partnership, or a discount code. It is Microsoft's way of saying that they noticed a year of unpaid, unglamorous community work and would like more of it, please.
Twenty-one years of this
I received the very first MVP award for Visual Studio Team System back in 2005, when Team Foundation Server was new, source control still meant a checkout lock to most people, and "DevOps" was not yet a word anyone said out loud. The product has been renamed roughly as many times as I have been renewed: Team System, Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio Online, Visual Studio Team Services, and finally Azure DevOps. The community around it never really changed. Same people, mostly, still trying to help teams ship software without losing their minds.