Meet Andrea Boschin – Silverlight MVP from Italy

View Comments





Tell us who you are?
My name is Andrea Boschin and I’m a 41 years old MVP on Silverlight. I live and work in Treviso, a beautiful town near Venice in Italy. My primary job is as employee for a local company where I develop web based applications for monitoring vehicles through a GPS based solution. I’m also a freelance consultant for companies which want to adopt the .NET Framework technologies. I like writing about Silverlight on my English blog  SilverlightPlayground where I post about my experiences with it trying to give a real world vision. I’m involved in speaking in many events and I’m also president of one of the most active user-groups in Italy (last year we was awarded by Microsoft as Community of the Year 2009). This leaves me a few free time I spend with my wife Daniela and my daughter Gaia.

Tell us about your MVP history, when were you first awarded?
I was first awarded as MVP in July 2007 and it taken me about the whole summer to become aware of what was happening to me. My first year as MVP was on ASP.NET platform. I used this technology since many years before being awarded and I currently do my work mostly with it and with Silverlight. During the second year of MVP that I’ve started for ASP.NET, my expertise has been converted to Silverlight due to my strong involvement on this astounding platform. This makes me the very first Silverlight MVP in my country and one of the first of the world and it is reason of big proud for me.


What do you do in order to keep up with latest tools and technologies?
I spend lot of my night time studying technologies. Usually I focus myself on a particular aspect of an interesting thing and I start exploring it trying to understand how it works, if it can help me and finally I try to implement a bunch of examples. This is the usual flow I start every time I get some news from the various blogs I read every day or when a new interesting beta is deployed. Unfortunately sometimes this does not ends with a real world experience just because I do not have a project to apply what I’ve learned, but many other times I’m able to connect my passion with my work and this makes me a lucky man. This happened with Silverlight, I’ve studied since the first 1.0 beta releases and then I applied to a part of the software developed for the company where I work, with great success.

What does being an MVP mean to you?
Being an MVP mean being on the edge of the technology and due to my passion it is the best thing that may happen to me. I really love to be in touch with the very new releases of early bits and I’ve to thanks the Silverlight team to be so generous sharing with me and other Insiders. But, leaving the personal, it is a great responsibility just because people expect you have answers to any question they do, and they deeply believe that everything you talk about is like gold. This makes me work double to be ready to answer the best to each request because I’m grateful of what the program gives me in terms of knowledge and communication.

What do you do when you are not building software’s?
I’m a family man. I have a wife and a daughter and when I’m not in front of my pc I spend my time on normal day-by-day activities. By the way I really like to travel, take photos, play with my daughter, prepare Italian dishes, and walking on the most beautiful mountains of the world, the Dolomites. But probably if I’m not building software I’m thinking at software. Some of my better ideas were born in my mind during my leisure.

If you could ask Steve Ballmer one question about Microsoft, what would it be?
Hey man, do you drink a beer? …ok, it’s a trick to ask him many questions, but honestly the thing I would really know is how he thinks the world will be in ten years, not only from the technology point of view. I think a man in his position has to have a great responsibility in how the world will evolve in the future and I would like to understand what he think about the argument.

Had a chance to attend “MVP Global Summit”? When and how was your experience?
I attended my first Summit during April 2008, a few months after being awarded, and it was a beautiful experience. The thing I’m most impressed was how people works in Microsoft. I dislike the way most Italian people think at work, and how many companies treat his employees, asking them to achieve results they simply cannot achieve due to missing resources and planning. Entering the campus in Redmond I had the strong impression of people loving them work and that can work with the better resources to reach their targets. It’s just a dream to me, and I’m already enjoying the time I will spent in Seattle the next February at the incoming MVP Summit 2010.

What makes you a great MVP?
I really do not know if I’m great, but if it is true, the reasons are the work and the passion: the work, to be always on the borderline of the technology and the passion to make the problems of people asking my help my problems.

What you think about the MVP’s role in promoting technology in your region?
In my country MVPs play a great part in this field. Thanks to the great work made from my MVP Lead in promoting the award and the awardees we have a big chance to be in contact with people and companies which ask us solutions to their problems and the occasion to promote the most innovative and reliable technologies.

What is in your computer bag?
I usually have only my laptop. I don’t like to bring with me something I cannot put into my laptop, starting from paper. I really hate paper and often look forward to the time when the paper will remain in form of trees and all will be an electronic transaction. Ok, I know… I’m a dreamer.

Who are your top 5 favorite MVPs?
It is very hard to select only 5 people, so my choice goes to some people I take as model and to someone else I read every day. They are:

  • Raffaele Rialdi – The sole person I know that knows everything from the technical point of view. Believe it or not, when I say everything I mean exactly all the things…
  • Davide Vernole – Davide has been the person taught me to be an MVP. He is the INETA country lead for Italy and he is the most community-oriented person I know.
  • Shawn Wildermuth – Shawn to me is a model in how to write technical posts. I love how he is able to explain things, disregard how complex are them.
  • Laurent Bugnion – He did a great work in his MVVM Light Toolkit for Silverlight and WPF. You have to look at his work on codeplex.
  • Dave Campbell –SilverlightCream is a great resource to be up to date with Silverlight.

If you get a chance to suggest one conference in your region? What would it be and why?
The best conference I know by personal experience is for sure the Tech-ED Developers EMEA. I visited it last time in Barcelona but in 2009 it took place in Berlin. Unfortunately I missed it last year, but the experience I made in the Ask The Expert booth during November 2008 was one of the most intense of my working life.

What is the best thing that has happened since you have become an MVP?
The best for me has been to be invited to speak about technologies, especially Silverlight. If someone had told me a few years ago I for sure didn’t believe him because I had never thought at me as an effective speaker. Being invited plays a great role in my personal satisfaction.

Who are your top 5 technical experts in your professional circle (from your country)?

  • Davide Vernole
  • Andrea Dottor
  • Mauro Servienti
  • Davide Senatore
  • Raffaele Rialdi

Absolutely in random order…. They are great professionals, always ready to give me suggestions and some of them are also good friends.

Which was the last book you read?
I love reading narrative, instead of technical manuals I often am unable to finish. While I prefer to read blogs to be up to date in my work, in my free time I read books that are completely stranger to tech. The latest I read was a novel from Stephen King, Duma Key.

If there was one place you could travel to, right now, where would it be and why?
Recently I’m fascinated by Egypt and I want strongly to visit Pyramids as soon as possible. My daughter is 8 years old and in a few time she will study the Egyptian story so I would like to show her what she is studying.

How can one be a part of MVP Club? Any suggestions for them?
The first is to forget to want become and MVP. You have to help people and being satisfied of your work and probably when you’ll forget the MVP award, you will be awarded.

Any Message you want to give to the readers of MicrosoftFeed?
Don’t be afraid of new technologies. Just try them and evaluate if they can help you in your projects. There will be many times you will find effective and fast solutions.

Your contact information?

Don’t forget to subscribe to our feeds, twitter or facebook page to get notified about the interviews with different MVPs in future.


Related posts

  1. Meet Daron Yöndem – Silverlight MVP and Microsoft Regional Director from Turkey Tell us who you are? My name is Daron Yöndem. I’m a Microsoft Regional Director, currently a Silverlight MVP leading INETA Turkey. I’m the founder of Deveload Software, an ISV based in Istanbul. For the last five years we...
  2. Meet Kostas Pantos – ASP.NET MVP from Greece Tell us who you are? My name is Kostas Pantos and I’m a software Architect currently starting my own software company in Greece www.techaholics.gr. Over the past years I’ve worked for a number of large companies in Greece and...
  3. Meet Baki Onur OKUTUCU – Windows Desktop Experience MVP from Turkey Tell us who you are? I’m Baki Onur. I was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1981. After graduating from high school, I trained myself to become an IT Specialist in areas related to Information Systems. I got a bachelor...
  4. Meet Luka Manojlovic – Management Infrastructure MVP from Slovenia Tell us who you are? My name is Luka Manojlovic and I am an MVP for third year now (renominated 1st of January 2010). I am an technology enthusiast and so I like to help community to get out...
  5. Meet Bashar Lulu – Visual Basic MVP from Kuwait Tell us who you are? Bashar Lulu, a Palestinian born and raised in Kuwait. I started writing applications professionally in 1994, first with Visual Basic (started with version 3.0) and now in Visual Studio 2008 (and more recently I...
«
»
blog comments powered by Disqus

Home | About | Contact