FIVE Questions with Waldek Mastykarz - ECS 2023 Interview Special

The European Collaboration Summit 2023 is around the corner. Time to get to know the speaker. We've asked 5 questions!

Today with the famous Waldek Mastykarz.

Q1: Well, we all know that IT can be very stressful at times. What do you do to calm down, relax and recharge your batteries?

I'm full of ideas and always thinking of something to do, so winding down is a challenge for me. I try to get some head space by reading books or watching movies. On a work day, I'll try to take a walk outside and carve out some time to exercise.

Q2: You are a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft. What does that mean and what makes you so passionate about your job?

In my job I show developers how they can build apps on Microsoft 365 to help their customers work better. A big part of the job is to listen to feedback, hear where we can do better and work together with our product groups to improve our products and resources. What I love about my job is its versatility. One day, I'm meeting with partners and customers to talk about their experiences building on Microsoft 365. On another, I'm coding a sample for a keynote or presenting a demo on a community call. Then, I plan an event involving our product groups, marketing and the community to show the art of possible on Microsoft 365. And on other days, I also get to be a product manager and engineer, designing and building a product.

Q3: You've built a lot of great things in your career. What was the most interesting project or initiative you worked on in your career?

I'll give you two. One is CLI for Microsoft 365: a command-line tool that lets you manage your Microsoft 365 tenant and upgrade SharePoint Framework projects. What's really cool is that it's a project that started as 1-person's idea with a handful of commands and evolved into a versatile tool with several hundred commands, maintained by an awesome team of Microsoft employees and MVPs with a vibrant community of contributors. We've been working on the tool for over 5 years now and it's so cool to see how far we've come. I'm grateful for the awesome folks I get to work with and love the energy and passion everyone brings to the project.

Another cool project is the Microsoft Graph Developer Proxy which lets you simulate API errors and see how your app handles them. It's started as a hack that I built with a few colleagues at Microsoft and we got the opportunity to make it publicly available, and even talk about it at ECS! It's a specialized tool but so important these days where every single app is connected to APIs. If you haven't tried it yet, you should definitely do so! I bet you'll learn a thing or two :)

Q4: What can we expect (and learn) from your collabsummit presentations?

All apps that we build today are connected to APIs. APIs make it very convenient to get data from other systems. Using them however, comes at a price that many folks aren't aware of. Gavin Barron and I will show you what you should pay attention to when using APIs in your apps, and you can verify that your apps won't break when cloud APIs that you use in your app fail. If you build apps, you must come see our talk.

Q5: What do you think makes collabsummit so special?

I had the privilege to join a few Collab Summits and what struck me each time was the camaraderie. Collab Summit isn't just yet another conference. It brings people together. It gives them an opportunity to meet each other, learn from each other, and bond. It's an event like no other that truly embraces the community spirit.