Reconnect Series: Jacky Yau

Jacky Yau is a Reconnect Member from Hong Kong. He received MVP Awards from 2006-2009. He is currently working as a Senior Project Manager.

Right now, Jacky is working on the Azure migration of a large global enterprise. The project involves migrating servers and end users from the traditional network system over to Azure.

For Jacky, being a Reconnect member means being able to connect with experts again after his MVP journey came to an end. “The journey of an MVP is amazing, and allowed me to get to know experts from all over the world,” said Jacky. “Now, I can reconnect with these great minds even after my career changed from having a technical focus.”

Last year, Jacky was thrilled to be able to participate in Reconnect events in Taiwan and meet with old friends. He also occasionally participates in Reconnect events that take place in China. For Jacky, the Reconnect community has allowed him to gain another perspective and delve back into learning about technical themes. He also enjoys learning from the Reconnect webcasts that are non-technical and career-focused. “I am looking forward to connecting with the community once again, “ said Jacky.

Jacky is currently involved in building and designing an application that lets people make payments with their phones. “When we first designed the application, we never expected it to be so successful that it’d be used by nearly half of the population of Hong Kong,” said Jacky. “This meant that the original solution we were using had quite a lot of limitations.”

“After discussing with the team, we started using Azure for the core front end system. Now, system performance is more efficient and we can autoscale according to usage. Before moving to Azure, the system would always fail during lunchtime. Now, it can handle more than 3 million customers in Hong Kong without any downtime!” explained Jacky.

“I am also involved with a community organization that helps orphaned children. This year, we’ll be giving 1,000 gifts to the children, in the name of Santa Claus of course!” he said.

While Jacky was an MVP, some of the favourite events he took part in were the Regional and Global Summits. “It was a fantastic experience which meant I could collaborate with people from all over the world, share our experiences working with Microsoft products, and understand their culture and thinking,” explained Jacky.

“At the Regional Summit, I was able to connect with other MVPs to discuss shared challenges in our industry and collaborate to attack problems together. We would also share and learn about each other’s experiences of working in our own countries and societies.”

To new MVPs, Jacky says “Enjoy and participate. Share more and you will get more.”

In the future, Jacky would like to write more books. “It’s been a long time since I last wrote for the community. I hope they’ll be interesting!”

Check out Jacky's Twitter and Facebook.