Monday Interview with International competition #2 - Rui Machada

Good morning, as you all may be aware of we had a competition that required you to recruit new memebers to the TechNet Wiki, the competition ran for 5 weeks and there was only two people that ended up as winner, I therefore name Sandro Pereira a Jedi Knight and his recruit Rui Machado a Jedi Padawan. And for the last one welcome to the TechNet Wiki, and thank you so much for your contribution, they do mean a lot for us.

Ed Price is awaiting your request for the Jedi Stick Figures, and his questions was:

Do you want Jedi Knight and Jedi Padawan versions? If so, what color light sabers do you want? If not, tell me some things you're interested in and what the stick figure might be wearing or holding.

You can simply reply to that by adding a comment!

So we jump into the interview with Rui Machado, I would have interviewed Sandro Pereira too, but ha had an interview not too long ago, you can read it here.

Rui Machado

Rui Machado

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

My name is Rui Machado I am 23 years old and I am a proud Portuguese guy. Since I was very little that I started to develop a great passion for technologies particularly Hardware and video games. I remember when I was about 7 years old I dismantled my first computer just to know it worked.

Well after that adventure my father got really mad has you can imagine but when three days later the computer was working again he got shocked. This was my first computeradventure but many others came next some with some not so happy endings. Year after year my passion for technologies increased and three years ago I started one of the biggest quests in my life, getting a Graduation in Technologies and Information Systems. I started to learn programming and applying it to build my own applications and games.

Just one year after I entered University I was invited to join the Microsoft Student Partner program created by Microsoft, a great group that promotes some students in focus in their countries for their academic achievements and passion for technology. This allowed me to open my knowledge about Microsoft Technologies and Software and to have contact with a particular technology, XNA Game Studio.

This Microsoft platform helped me developing one of my main specialties (in an amateur scale of course), programming. In 2011 I participated in a Microsoft competition for indie game developers, XNA Pizza Night, and I took the third place out of twenty one teams with a game developed in just three days. I have already participated in several Windows Phone 7 competitions as well which allowed me to develop another skill, mobile development, especially with XAML and C# (Silverlight).

All this experiences, child adventures and my Graduationtook me to where I am right now, DevScope. I entered with some main skills, programming in C#, VB and JAVA, querying and building databases with TSQL or MySQL but DevScope offered me an opportunity to jump to another level, learning BizTalk and all it's underlying technologies as Schemas, XSLT or orchestrations and all this with a MVP mentor, Sandro Pereira.

Off course that I didn´t let the opportunity go and as a final Graduation internship I took this challenge, so now I am a member of the DevScope Integration team learning and implementing some small projects that allow me to grow as a BizTalk Consultant.

What are your big projects right now?  

At this stage of my internship I am starting to develop some mapping of buying orders and invoices for a Portuguese enterprise however and because I’m a trainee everything is happening fast. Some weeks ago I was just discovering Functoids and orchestrations and now I am already implementing projects. A direct answer to your question is that I don’t have a big project I have an amount of small projects that turn my hole internship into a big project.

Besides your work on TechNet Wiki, where do you contribute?

My biggest contribution channel is my blog, in which I publish my findings regarding BizTalk Server, Azure EAI and EDI, Visual Lighswitch and one of my favorite, Windows Phone 7. Besides my blog I like to help in several Portuguese communities related to the technologies I have just enumerated. I must say that working on TechNet Wiki was part of my internship however I got the taste for it and now I contribute for fun.

What is TechNet Wiki for? Who is it for?

I think that TechNet Wiki at a first glance could seem like the perfect place for developers catalog and publish their life work and help others growing faster in their professional path so that knowledge after knowledge people can take a better use of technologies, however,starting to work with TechNet Wiki showed me much more than this.

As you can see I am giving an interview because my work is being recognized, as you know sometimes it´s a little bit disappointing when people don´t thank the work you do for them, you publish something and you have three hundred people using your solution and only one thank.TechNet Wiki is a live community that is always observing your work and encourages you to continue your good work even if those people don´t.

This way it’s not only a great place for experienced people share their knowledge but a much better place to start showing others what is your way of learning something and get the praise or criticism that lets you keep the good path or take you to a new one.

What do you do with TechNet Wiki, and how does that fit into the rest of your job?

TechNet Wiki is a great place for to store my learning’s. When someone tell me do something my first impulse tells me to open Word and start reporting what I am doing, this way when I finished that task I can publish it to TechNet Wiki, show this way to the community how I did it and be able to read my own post if I have to do that same task latter. This way it’s my own daily diary for my job activities and tasks.

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

One of the things I like the most is the ability to maintain an article alive, everyone can edit our own post and give a little bit of his own experience and knowledge. This is the Wiki philosophy at its higher level which makes an article not ours but of the entire community. Another thing I like is the clean white design that tech net has which is also very user friendly and simple to use.

There is also something I must reference, the competition side of tech net wiki with medals and points that make us go to our page every day to see if someone rated five stars one of our posts or if we got another medal. That’s a cool initiative to once again make tech net a live community.

On what Wiki articles do you spend most of your time?

For sure on Windows Azure EAI and EDI, mainly because it’s an unknown Technology and I want to explain every step I make so that people can clearly understand my explanations.

What are your favorite Wiki articles you’ve contributed?

I have two articles that I like and that gave me a lot of fun while making them, the first one is a Windows Azure EAI Routing Exercise
the second one is about Windows Azure EAI as well but this time about Creating a LOB target.

Who are your top 5 favorite Wiki article writers?

Of course that in the first place I must put Sandro Pereira, mainly because he’s one of the biggest BizTalk contributors and I mainly search about BizTalk and his posts pop up first. Other wiki article writers I really like to follow is Steef-Jan Wiggers and yourself :)

Who has impressed you in the Wiki community, and why?

Both Sandro Pereira and Steef-Jan Wiggers impressed me mainly because of the amount of post they have already made. This shows not only a great expertise but also the will to share this knowledge with others.

What does success look like for TechNet Wiki?

The possibility to post something that is shared by all community members and able to be renewed by them.  This way an article never gets obsolete.

How did Sandro Nominate you, and why did you want to contribute?

Sandro as my internship project mentor told me about TechNet Wiki in my early days at Devscope. He told me to start posting mainly because while writing we are structuring the knowledge we acquire so TechNet wiki was and is a great place to store all the knowledge I develop. One other reason was because he knew that this is a very active community and if I was saying something wrong someone would correct me, this way I was double learning.

Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions, I do hope you have a wonderful career and that BizTalk will be nice to you.

Jedi Knight / Norwegian Ninja Tord (Blog, Twitter, Wiki, Profile)