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Shannon O'Donald's avatar
Shannon O'Donald
Former Employee
Jun 09, 2017

Friday Feature: Joseph Velliah

We are excited to introduce this week’s Friday Feature— Joseph Velliah is a Development Architect and Principal Applications Developer at CA Technologies. Read what he has to say about launching his own blog and DevOps below!

 

Joseph Velliah

Job Title: Principal, Applications Developer

Company Name:  CA Technologies

MVP Profile: https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/5002567?fullName=Joseph%20%20Velliah

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephvelliah/

Personal Blog: https://blog.sprider.org/

 

 

  1. Tell us a little bit about where you work and your role in the organization.

I am working for CA Technologies(Austin-TX-USA). As a Development Architect/Principal, Applications Developer, I

o   Encourage user adoption and embed a sense of excitement in the business regarding SharePoint.

o   Meet the business and build rapport.

o   Demo technology to business and IT users.

o   Detect business opportunities where SharePoint can be leveraged.

o   Communicate tips, tricks and best practices with user base.

o   Liaison between business and IT on all SharePoint requirements.

 

I also run a blog at https://blog.sprider.org where you can expect to read HOW TOs and scenarios that I run into during my day to day job. I hope my posts will give back a little to the community that has helped me. 

 

  1. The IT Pro community is a highly-engaged community. What role have these communities played in your career? What drove you to start your own blog (SPRIDER)?

I became a better mentor within our team after following IT Pro community. “Sharing is Caring” is the one drove me to start my own blog. As a mentor, my role is to get the agility we need to drive business value delivery within our team.

  • Increase confidence in team members role
  • Provide insight into the day-to-day activities

 

I’ve made lots of connection via sprider.org blog which helped me to work with the connections on few critical issues where I was struggling to resolve. Just to highlight three of them Scot Hillier, Waldek Mastykarz from Rencore and Vadim Tabakman from Nintex

 

My advice to blog launchers:

  • Be yourself
  • Do not copy paste content from other articles which I did when I started my blog J
  • Keep refreshing the content as per comments received
  • Publish your blog statistics in social media to get more attention

 

  1. What would you say is your most valuable skill? Why?

Microsoft SharePoint. I started my career with Java but SharePoint is the tool made me stand where I am now. I love this tool for the simplicity, user friendliness, features, innovation, support and above all it is Microsoft’s product.

 

  1. There’s a lot of discussion around DevOps and agile. How has your role as a developer changed since your first started? Why do you think there is more interest in DevOps and Agile than in years past? Any examples?

DevOps and Agile made me to get the credit for the work I do even if it is small. DevOPs means increased customer satisfaction with the release model, trust and self-awareness, better business involvement and delivery is faster and more continuous. DevOps is designed to reduce the time to deploy new or latest changes and there is improved delivery quality and performance.

 

Recently, during our massive MOSS to SharePoint Online migration, we needed specific validation steps to be automated for our business partners. None of the big SharePoint vendors offered such detailed analysis tools and our hands were tied. Knowing that we were losing time, I jumped in and quickly deciphered the need and developed and deployed a web based tool that not only met but exceeded the requirements. Additionally, I was able to expand on the concept and offer custom solutions that were beyond what we could have imagined. 

 

  1. With technology changing rapidly, how do you stay up-to-date with all of the new product releases and updates?

I used to allocate minimum one hour per day apart from my full-time job duties to go through new features, upcoming changes, skills I need to improve, participate in forums, listen to podcasts while I commute, etc.,I follow Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft and all the MVPs in twitter for Microsoft stuff. Additionally, participate in Special Interest/Product Group conversation, PnP Webcasts and GitHub Repos

 

 

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