Feb 20, 20213 min read

My journey with the Power Platform

Hello,

Well if you are new here, then welcome! My blog is about my main passions in life:

Mental Health
Community
The Power Platform

If you are unsure about what the Power Platform is, it is about enabling and empowering a group of people to be able to develop applications. I have a background of 20+ years in IT support roles, but I am not a coder, I never have been. But as previous posts are testament to, I am a visual learner, and I love what the Power Platform brings to people so that they feel empowered in their application development journey.

Recently, my journey with the Power Platform has taken an unexpected turn. In the last few months, my post about mental health and how the Power Platform has personally helped me over come my anxieties has led to some amazing opportunities for me to speak about these issues as well as convey my passion for the platform.

I want, at this point to shout out to Jon Levesque, not only is he an amazing person in the community but he is also a close friend now, and he has helped me through this, he has seen me at my worst anxiety wise and has been with me on this journey. He is not one to take praise well, but Jon, if you are reading this - I truly thank you for everything. I would not be where I am today without the help and support you have provided me, and I know I am not alone when I say that.

As I explained in a previous post, my journey started properly when I attended the Humans Of IT sessions at Microsoft Ignite in London, in January 2020. This was an amazing experience, and I am happy to announce that I have come full circle and I am going to be speaking at Microsoft Ignite on 2nd March from 19:00 - 19:30 GMT as part of the Connection Zone Humans of IT sessions. I was blown away to be asked, and I really thank Kady Riggan and Allie Wieczorek for the opportunity to present there.

Please click on the picture below to register for Microsoft Ignite 2021:

I have also had the opportunity to express my love for the Power Platform to other people within Microsoft community and the wider community as a whole.

Yesterday (19/02/2021), I was part of James Phillips' (President of Microsoft Business Applications) key note speech at the Global Power Platform Boot Camp. This is an event that runs in over 81 countries, and I was honoured to join Mary Thompson to chat to James about how the Power Platform has had a positive impact on our lives, as well as how it has helped us feel a sense of community. You can watch James' keynote at the start of this video here:

It was a pleasure to join James in this chat, and special thanks to Jon Levesque, Sameer Bhangar and Umran Hasan for making this happen.

Finally, a special thank you to Laura Martelli, who heard my story through Sameer Bhangar and Umran Hasan and asked me to record with her about my power platform experiences and how they had helped the community in Berkhamsted. Charles Lamanna (Microsoft CVP, Low Application Platform) used the video in his All Hands meeting to all of his engineering staff at Microsoft.

This was great, as in conversation with Laura when recording this, it was good to know that the engineering team behind these applications were getting to see the kind of power they were creating to enable people to really transform their lives.

Finally, I just wanted to say thank you again to all of the people that have enabled me to bring my story to life, to be public in my mental health journey. I don't think anxiety is ever going to go away completely, but using these tools and helping empower others and seeing their faces when they can see the art of the possible realised is an amazing feeling. I hope to show this to other people, both in my personal life and working career.

Thank you:

Carla

Katie, my wife