Navigating Tech Fame and Family Life with Darren Neese, the Orlando MVP: A Tale of Content Creation, SharePoint Challenges, and Power Apps Passion

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Orlando, florida in the US of A. He's a lead trainer at Super Power Labs. He was first awarded his MVP in 2023. The great thing about him is he's a YouTuber content creator. You can find him on TikTok and you can find him on most social medias. I've watched a lot of his videos. He's been the IT industry since 1999, mostly as a software developer, trainer and IT generalist. You can find links to his bio, social media etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, darren hey, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate this. Good to have you on the show. I suppose the first place I came across you was TikTok Really Okay.

Darren Neese: 1:46
Yeah, Usually it's YouTube. I'm glad to hear that you find me on TikTok. I use TikTok quite a bit myself, just to consume stuff that's interesting.

Mark Smith: 1:57
Yeah, of course. Of course, I'm a big consumer. Tell me about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Darren Neese: 2:05
Food. The first thing that comes to mind is pizza. Yeah, I eat pizza almost every day. That's probably not good for my In fact, I know it's not good for my figure Family I am a husband and father of six children. Yes, you heard that right six Fun. You know what? To be honest, I love power apps. That's what I find fun, that's awesome, that is awesome.

Mark Smith: 2:40
Six kids, mate, you've been busy.

Darren Neese: 2:44
Yeah, a little bit. I can tell you the story if you want to hear it. I don't know if it's going to be all that interesting.

Mark Smith: 2:49
Are there any triplets? I?

Darren Neese: 2:51
got twin boys. The third pregnancy was twin boys, my first marriage. So essentially I wanted a boy and we had two girls, and then the third one was doubles and then I remarried, so I have two toddlers in the house right now.

Mark Smith: 3:10
Wow, I know what that's like. I've got a three-year-old and a one and a half-year-old Wow yeah. And I came from a family of seven, so seven kids, so I know what big families are like. Okay, yeah, very cool, very cool, hey. So what I'm interested in is you've obviously created a lot of content. For example, if I look at your YouTube channel, you've got around 15,000 plus almost 16,000 subscribers coming on there. Is that your main thing? Is that you create content, because I just noticed in the last probably five years, a lot of MVPs that I think blogging or forums was their thing, but YouTube has really come of age, right, and a lot of people are creating amazing YouTube channels. What's your typical process outside of what you do with? You do some live streaming as well, is it right?

Darren Neese: 4:11
Yes, yeah, in fact, most of the content that I create, most of the content that I release on YouTube, is the live streams. We go live every Saturday morning, 10am Eastern, and you know there's a lot less video editing to do. A lot of times the video editing takes longer than actually shooting the video. So of course, I feel like that's a win-win and people seem to like the live streams. But if I feel like there is a need in the Power Platform community that I could answer that would provide value, I will take the time to make a video specifically for that.

Mark Smith: 4:59
But yeah, and tell me a bit about your tools, tools of the trade. So, camera, microphone, let's start with those.

Darren Neese: 5:09
So I am using a Yeti Blue mic. It's actually a. Of course I'm touching I probably shouldn't touch this a World of Warcraft themed Blue.

Mark Smith: 5:24 Yeti.

Darren Neese: 5:25
So that sort of exposes me more back to the fun. I do play World of Warcraft when I have time, which is very scarce.

Mark Smith: 5:34
I know what you mean.

Darren Neese: 5:36
So that's my mic. I think I paid an extra $100 just for all the, because I could hit a button and I guess there's software and I could make myself sound like characters or things inside the game. I thought that was. Of course. I never use it. But camera I got a little fancy on the camera.

Darren Neese: 5:55
My wife does marketing and she needed a good, solid camera to do some high level photography work and so we bought her a camera for her business. It's a Nikon Z6. It's a mirrorless full frame camera and I'm using a 50 millimeter prime lens so there's no zooming or anything, but I can open up the aperture in these lights that you I know. You know this is an audio podcast, but you can see there's some like blurry stuff that's actually lights in my background, yeah. So, and then the Nikon was sitting around one day. I'm like I bet that would be a really cool webcam. I started using it and I fell in love with it, so I had to buy her a or buy myself one of them so wouldn't be taken away from her. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 6:49
Nice. And what about lighting? Do you have key lights and whatnot? You know part of you, yeah.

Darren Neese: 6:55
So I've got some basic run of the mill lighting that I picked up on Amazon. So one of the lights I actually used I got a little bit into photography when we bought the Nikon and it's a light that doesn't flash, it's constantly on probably like 80 bucks, and I got two of these big lights that and there's something in front of the light to make it soft and, as you can see, my face is facing that. I got like just a regular run of the mill ring light off to the side that sort of serves as the fill light.

Mark Smith: 7:35
Nice, very cool. Tell me about growing an audience. You know 15,000 is in our community. That's a good number. You know there's a few people that got some higher numbers, but you know I've been on YouTube for a long time and don't come anywhere close to those type of numbers. How have you grew on that audience?

Darren Neese: 7:56
I think at the most basic level, I just want to provide value, you know, and I listen, even whenever the feedback, sometimes in the comments, you'll get somebody that's fairly frank and I was always told to like hey, don't, if you're a sensitive person, don't read your comments or turn the comments off because people are really nasty, mean, I really haven't experienced much of that at all, but sometimes there's some constructive criticism like, oh man, ouch, you know. But if I just take a moment and consider what they're saying and ask myself what truth is in this, what type of things can I change that will ultimately make it better for my viewership? And you know, I got some advice from somebody years ago, which is, when you interact with people, don't try to take value, don't ask for value. Provide the value, you know. Just provide the value, provide the value, provide the value, you know, and then you become valuable.

Darren Neese: 9:09
And a lot of times people will say is there anything I can do for you? It's like well, you know, I did all this expecting nothing in return, but if you could help me with this, that would, yeah, that would be valuable to me, you know, and I find people are reciprocal in nature, you know, like you walk into a department store, you hold the door for a family coming in with kids or you know, and usually the dad or somebody in the group will hold the door for you know. It's just like. I just believe it's natural. People you know give them value, help them out and you establish relationship, which is what I believe business a lot of times comes down to. I'm just not looking for some type of if there is any type of monetary exchange or transaction, that itself isn't important to me. I wanna have a long-term relationship with people and take care of people you know. Provide continuously, provide that value under promise over deliver. I love it.

Mark Smith: 10:59
I love it. Tell me you said, power ups is your thing. How did you get into power ups? Had your first discovered and tell me your journey in that space.

Darren Neese: 11:08
This is actually an interesting story. I'm really glad that you asked this. This is really cool. So I was working as a contractor for the state of Florida and one of the agencies there and in each district of the state in the state of Florida and I'm sure other states are like this where we had seven different districts in the state, it's just, you know, geographically sort of split up, and they had one of me in each district and we were called application development liaisons and we're software developers and so if there was an app that needed to be done, if there's any type of automation, we were the one person in the matter of, you know, maybe 10 counties within the state, you know, and I would be it. And once a year they would have us all go up to the capital of Florida, which is Tallahassee, the very northern tip, and we would get together, all of us liaisons would be able to meet each other in person and we would try to collaborate and overcome some of the challenges that we're all experiencing and all this stuff. And then they're at the headquarters. They had software architects and other software developers and managers and executives that would either be listening or contributing to this situation, and what happened was there was this one individual that got up and he said listen, each of us has between 20 and 40 applications that we support. They were Microsoft shop, c, sharp, aspnet, sql Server. I've pretty much based my whole career 25 years on Microsoft technologies. That's what we're all using.

Darren Neese: 13:04
There was a liaison that was using Microsoft product called Light Switch. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but yeah, it's like. I believe it was a little bit of a code generator and it allowed you to do things very quickly, a rapid application development platform or RAD tool. It actually utilized Silverlight. There was a legal problem with it, to be honest. I believe we dug around like why is Microsoft abandoning this Light Switch? Because that was the main objection by the self-architect. It's like listen, you just showed us 10 applications you did in Light Switch in two months, but we can't use it because Microsoft is saying, hey, we're no longer supporting this, starting in a few months or whatever.

Darren Neese: 13:55
At first we're getting all excited and then we heard that we're like oh what? His response to that was like listen, I don't care if we use Light Switch or not, but us liaisons, we need a tool to whip out applications Quickly, not just an application every three months or six months or, in some cases, a year a large project. There were like, okay, well, there's this thing out there called Power Apps and a lot of us hadn't heard of it. Maybe we had, but we hadn't touched it because it was a lot. It had to be enabled and we're in a government tenant and we were like a few versions behind and all this stuff.

Darren Neese: 14:35
I kept on asking. I'm like, hey, can you guys turn that on? Hey, can you turn it on? Can you turn it on for me? And like a year and a half later my boss said, hey, would you like to be the guy that spearheads this and find out if this is actually viable for us liaisons? And so I checked it out and at first I thought, oh, this tool isn't good. I had so many problems at first and I thought it was the tool. And what I slowly realized is that no, I was the one that sucked, I was the one that wasn't using the tool right. There were a lot of things. Actually, as a software developer, I had to sort of like get out of my head. As a full stack developer or traditional type of developer, you might have a variable. Let's call it x x x equals, whatever you know.

Darren Neese: 15:34
Or, in the case of Power Ops, I was trying to put a value into a text box or text input control, let's say text input one dot dot text equals, and nothing would happen. And I'm like what is going on here? This is junk, this is a toy, you know. But I started to add, just little by little. It was a slow. I tell people, if you go to my YouTube channel and I have a little trailer and I say listen, I'm a software developer over 25 years, I'm here to teach you Power Ops. But guess what? Power Ops was difficult for me. It took me like a good solid six months to wrap my mind around it. And there was this moment where everything sort of clicked. I'm like, oh my goodness, I can do all kinds of things with this tool. So I'm trying to remember what the question was. Did I answer the question or did I go off? No, you're right.

Mark Smith: 16:31
You're telling a story about how you got into Power Ops and that's brilliant, that it wasn't just an overnight thing. You know you've grown with it and when you say you use Power Ops, are you a SharePoint backend person or are you a proper dataverse person?

Darren Neese: 16:47
I would like to be known as a proper database type of guy Working for the state of Florida. They didn't want to buy premium licensing for all the users in the state, which was like 10,000 for that agency, and SharePoint was the only thing. In fact, I've done a poll on my YouTube channel where I put a post out there in the community tab. I say, guys, I'm not asking what is the best data source, what do you think the best data source? I'm asking what is the main data source that you reach for or that you use in your Power Ops? Just give me one answer Is it SharePoint?

Darren Neese: 17:23
Is it SQL Server? Is it Dataverse? Is it SQL Server, Is it Dataverse or something else? I think it was a little over 70% said SharePoint and so I got really good working for the state of Florida using I probably did a dozen apps and you know what. It worked really well. I don't like the fact that a user maybe could find out where the data is at, you know, because they have to have access to the SharePoint list, right, and they find it. That's like a developer's worst nightmare is users going directly to the data source and modifying and ignoring all the business rules I built into my application.

Mark Smith: 18:01
It's interesting because, because I've always come from partner side, for me SharePoint, and particularly its governance model, is just and and its ALM portability, all those type of things. When you work at a partner, right, you're working across customers and if you want to lift functionality from one environment to another, sharepoint's not your first tool of choice, right? Because it's very difficult to manage that that type of thing. And it was interesting.

Mark Smith: 18:33
I just did a project recently after I've had 20 years coming from Dynamics CRM as a background, therefore all model driven, data centric and I did a project that was just on SharePoint and we got nine months in and I said let's get rid of the that SharePoint out of the mix. We're going to go to Dataverse because the amount of overhead that it was creating for the team we're deploying to the one of the largest banks in Australia, the amount of overhead it was creating by sticking with SharePoint, was just not worth the effort. When you've got to have a full stack you know ALM process, cross tenant, not just cross environment, you know deployment models SharePoint just doesn't cut it, I find, on the big projects.

Darren Neese: 19:25
So yeah, Absolutely, I see my favorite one.

Mark Smith: 19:30
What's that? What's that?

Darren Neese: 19:32
I said, SQL Server is my absolute favorite.

Mark Smith: 19:34
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, if you've come from that, that that, yeah, I'd understand that. The thing is is that I think why there's been such an adoption of SharePoint is because of that freemium model. Right, it was easy to find. And if you're an end customer using the technology who doesn't have a SharePoint, right, so tick that, that's done. And I know of so many people in the Power Apps community that just hit the build an app and SharePoint and that was their first exposure to Power Apps and they're off to the races, you know. So it is interesting.

Mark Smith: 20:06
It is interesting it's horses for courses, but it's interesting that your polling showed that 70% are using SharePoint. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five years, because I think Microsoft may have feel they've hurt themselves with their seeded what they call that seeded model and that it was so good, people didn't need to go to premium and, and I and I think that that might have hurt them from a revenue perspective. But who knows, who knows? Last question becoming an MVP. What are your thoughts? What are your?

Darren Neese: 20:46
thoughts no-transcript. It's nice to be recognized as somebody providing value and helping people in the community. That's my first thought. And you know I'm really I'm a Microsoft fanboy. I have so many certifications I stopped doing the certification thing. I used to work for a lot of Microsoft partners. Of course, they want to make it all these you know the MC, dba, mc, samc, st, and I was a MC, microsoft certified trainer, and everything, and I actually like, like you know, it's much different than a certification, of course, but you're, you know, you're being recognized for that, so it's something that I appreciate.

Darren Neese: 21:26
I feel like that is a gift from my viewership, because if there was no audience then you know, I that value wouldn't have been there and I wouldn't have never been nominated for it. And I know that how it came about for me, daniel Christian contacted me, I believe, over Twitter, and asked me if I'd been nominated for MVP. I'm like, no, I would be very honored, you know, if I was nominated, and he nominated me right away and I was very grateful for that. Now, at the time, I had been out there on YouTube for maybe eight months, something along those lines. So the nomination went and then it was reviewed and then it was denied because I hadn't been around for a year, had been contributing for a year. So it was like perhaps too early, you know.

Darren Neese: 22:26
And then during that time, matthew Devaney Devaney, he reached out and he asked me the same question. I'm like, actually, daniel Christian nominated me, you know, and I said it's still pending. And he says, well, if you ever need another nomination, let me know. I would gladly do that for you. And so, when it sort of fell apart, I reached back out to Daniel Christian and didn't get a response right away. Perhaps I used, you know, maybe the sometimes, you know, people don't get their Twitter messages or they're not checking them or whatever. I'm sure I'm guilty of that myself. But I reached out to Matt and I'm like, hey, I'm, you know, I need another nomination if you're still willing, you know. So he nominated me and I, you know, I feel blessed that, you know went through and and you know I was awarded that or recognized as that. So I'm sort of humbled and I'm grateful.

Mark Smith: 23:28
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MBP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.