Paul Glavich is a Reconnect member from Sydney, Australia, and is currently a Principal Consultant at Readify. Paul was awarded Microsoft MVP from 2003 - 2016 in ASP.Net.
In his current role at Readify, Paul works across a number of interesting projects, including helping a large local retailer migrate their applications to the cloud (Microsoft Azure) and enhancing their automation pipelines in deploying these applications to the cloud. Paul uses multiple technologies to design new key systems (such as enterprise-wide APIs) in a cloud-native way, including Service Bus, CosmosDB, Azure Functions, Webjobs, Angular 5 .Net core, and Azure pipelines.
To Paul, being a Reconnect member is all about exactly that: being connected. “It’s sort of like that bar that people go to after work and meet up with familiar faces for a chat,” he explained. “It’s a very casual and welcoming place to maintain relationships with fellow ex-MVPs from around the world.”
Paul has particularly enjoyed being involved with the Global Steering Group during his time as a Reconnect Member. He added that “the Reconnect community has shown me how willing everyone is to help and provide value. It is easy to see why Reconnect members were MVPs as they continue to provide valuable assistance to the community.”
While an MVP, Paul worked on a number of projects. One of his favourites was a mentorship project where he was paired with a gentleman from South Africa named Abisoye Falabi. Paul provided technical mentoring to Abisoye, as well as helping him with career and business matters. The two are still in contact today: “I have yet to meet him face-to-face, but find the conversations very rewarding,” Paul said.
As well as working at Readify, Paul is also involved in other community projects. One of these is running the Global Azure DevOps Bootcamp in Sydney, a worldwide coordinated event that takes place in June, with the aim to help participants learn all about DevOps practices using Microsoft Azure.
Paul also ran the Visual Studio 2019 launch party in Sydney which took place in April this year. As well as this, he has a number of open source projects, the most active of which is a fluent API for Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services. It currently supports TextAnalytics, image recognition and face detection cognitive services. His most popular open source project (at around 47,000 downloads) is a cache adaptor for the full framework that allows a consistent cache interface against a number of cache implementations such as Memchached, ASP.NET web, Redis, and in memory cache.
To new MVPs, Paul says “just keep doing what you are doing. Not just to be an MVP, but to be a good person who wants to help others. Being an MVP is a great added bonus from that.”
In the future, Paul plans to continue to try to assist others in whatever way possible, as well as taking a more firm technical direction towards augmented/mixed reality technology with devices like HoloLens. “I believe these will form key components of the future and skilling up in this different development stack will be important,” he said. Further to that, he would like to create some new OSS projects, as well as contribute back to some from Microsoft.
Follow Paul on Twitter @glav and check out his blog.
