We’re back once again to Reconnect and thrilled to be joined by 12-time Office Apps & Services MVP Hilton Giesenow! An industry veteran of almost 20 years, Hilton counts experience across varied IT, development and consulting roles, geographies and client industries and types.
Hailing from Cape Town, South Africa, Hilton recently founded a company called ChitChattr which builds products for Microsoft Teams.
Moreover, “I'm having a ton of fun doing lots of Teams development,” Hilton says, “so lately I’ve been learning a lot and working on a number of related open source projects (Teams PnP Samples, Graph Toolkit, Text Recognizers, Teams developer docs), and building some awesome Teams products at ChitChattr (such as our new TeamMate new employee onboarding welcome bot)”
Hilton, who mostly stays in touch with Reconnect via the Yammer group, says MVP has played a large role in his life and the community helps him to still feel part of the program.
“It has helped me keep in touch with other community members, both Reconnect and 'regular' MVPs,” Hilton says. In terms of other projects and community organizations, Hilton says: “I'm a regular contributor to various projects, both code and docs-related, but also quite active on Stack Overflow helping answer Teams development questions (and learning a lot from other people's challenges!)”
Hilton fondly recalls various global gatherings during his time as an MVP, and encourages all program newcomers to get the most out of the program. “Enjoy the program and keep up the great contributions - community is all about sharing and helping others - we're all 'beginners' in something!”
Looking forward, Hilton says: “Right now I'm loving learning about Teams development, so planning to keep learning more and contributing to the Teams development community. I’m also planning to improve our current ChitChattr products and to build a bunch of new ones for Teams.”
For more on Hilton, visit his blog.