MVP 14

Just over 13 years ago, Microsoft gave me my first "Most Valuable Professional" award. Out of the blue, as far as I was concerned. It wasn't something I'd planned for and it certainly wasn't something I'd expected, but it has become a cornerstone of my professional identity.

Indulge me while I go off on a bit of a tangent here: like the other things in my professional life that have turned into a success, the things I did to earn that first MVP award were things I was going to do anyway. Things like speaking at events, writing blog posts, and, of course, running Have I Been Pwned. It's an enormous privilege that these activities are things I do out of passion, and they've given me a successful career. That's wild, and I can still hardly believe it 😊

As I've said each year when this award has landed in my inbox, and I'll say again now after the 14th one just landed, thank you for giving me the platform on which I've been able to build this career. It takes people like you reading this now to turn up to my talks, consume the posts I write and use HIBP to do useful things after data breaches happen to make me successful at what I do.

So, cheers to everyone who has contributed to my 14th Microsoft MVP award 🍻

Lucky MVP 13

Each year since 2011, Microsoft has sent me a lovely email around this time:

I've been fortunate enough to find a passion in life that has allowed me to do what I love and make a great living out of it all whilst contributing to the community in a meaningful and impactful way. In last year's MVP announcement blog post, I talked about one of my favourite contributions of all that year being the Pwned Passwords ingestion pipeline for the FBI. This year, they sent me something nice in return:

This is so cool, thanks @FBI 😊 pic.twitter.com/aqMi3as91O

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) June 28, 2023

Thank you to everyone that helps me on this journey by consuming the things I create. Reading my posts, watching my videos, turning up to my talks and consuming services like HIBP and Pwned Passwords. The latter is a great example of community uptake: as of today, there were 5.12 billion requests to that service in just the last 30 days 🤯 That's amazing, thank you everyone 😊