Community on Hat Full of Data

Humbled and Honoured

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I got the news I get to be a Data Platform MVP for another year!

As tradition dictates I am of course Humbled and Honoured. In reality though, I’m hugely grateful to lots of people who let me be me in this community.

Hosts of user groups and conferences who create the place for us to meet and present
Helpers who make conferences work, tell me when to end a session and help me find my room
Humans who came to my sessions, read my blog, watched my youtube channel, asked questions and made it feel worth while. If any non-humans were involved I am of course grateful to them as well.
Hecklers¹
Handful of friends who have shared the highs, the hurdles, headaches and the hilarity of another year in tech.
Hubby, Harry, who has done the airport drop offs and pickups, cooked while I build slides and demos, never complains when head off to another conference or user group.

Turns out H is a great letter.

The award comes with a badge, an updated one this year, but in reality the award opened doors for me to an amazing community. We use the ever changing, name changing, icon changing² tech as an excuse to gather, but we stay because of the community of wonderfully diverse, usually neurodivergent and amazing humans we are.

A huge thank you to my co-speakers this year Claire Edgson, Joe Griffin, Lewis Baybutt and Will Johnson. We rocked!

Also to Mark Pryce-Mayer who makes me laugh and fixes the lakehouses I break, Sue Bayes who makes me smile every week, Alex Powers who encouraged me to keep going, Ian Tweedie who helped me transfer my blog from wordpress to Hugo, so blogging will again be enjoyable and Ash Graham-Brown who did the accessibility work to make sure a screen reader makes some sense on my blog.

And last, but never least, Rie Merritt who looks after us Data Platform MVPs, keeps us in line and always supports us non-males in a male dominated industry.

My advice to anyone looking in on the community, unsure how to join, please reach out. Come talk to a speaker after a session, ask the questions, be brave and say hello. Many of us are incredibly shy, anxious and imposter syndrome is our best skill, so we understand your shyness. You are one of us, I promise. Take a look at my Upcoming Events page and if you are going to be at one of them reach out to me beforehand and we can have a coffee together and I’ll introduce to people you want to meet.

¹ You know who you are
² Microsoft stop it!

Happy New Year and 2025 Review

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:52:18 +0000

Welcome to 2026!

In a world full of AI generated content I am very proud that none of the content here on this blog will be AI generated. Mostly because here is my personal notebook of how to do stuff. I still refer back to my first posts from April 2019 on writing SVG. That copy button in code blocks I sorted for my own sanity.

In the 5+ years of writing this blog I’ve posted 128 posts, had 600k+ views, way too many spam comments and had a subscribe button which over 200 people clicked but never sent an email. I’m hoping this is my first post that will email out to subscribers. Apologies for not sending before and for those who had forgotten they subscribed 3 years ago.

Blog Activity in 2025

17 new posts
140k views

I was not as active as I’d like to have been in 2025. No good reasons but it gives me some new goals for 2026. I’m aiming for more regular posts, using tools so I’m not overwhelmed by spam comments.

The most popular post on this site is how to pull data from a Power BI dataset using Power Automate, it got 10% of last years views. The second place post was Power Automate to trigger a Fabric data pipeline. Just goes to show I should still do the Power Automate working with data stuff posts and add videos.

YouTube Activity in 2025

2025 was also not a good year for video creation for me. I only made 3 videos! Amazingly I got 170k views and gained 800+ subscribers. Another goal for me to improve on video creation and maybe get over that 10k subscribers. Lets see what we can do. For those who haven’t subscribed here is the link

https://www.youtube.com/c/hatfullofdata123

Do let me know if there are videos you think I should do.

Speaking

I had a fun year of going to conferences and user groups. It is my second family of speakers and regular attendees and I am incredibly grateful to those who volunteer to make these events happen. From a user group with only 3 attendees to a conference hall with 100 people in it, I love the buzz of sharing knowledge and being a community.

In May last year I started putting my PowerPoint decks on github with other resources to support sessions. If I’m honest its so I know where I’ve stored my decks when I need to refer to it for a future session or remember what I did last year! Here’s the link

https://github.com/HatFullOfData/Sessions

Looking Forward

There will be more blog posts, there will be more videos. I enjoy doing them, its helps my mental health. I already have conferences planned that I will be at, speaking or attending. (Love a conference that I just attend occasionally)

Here are a few of them, if you are going to be there, please come say hello.

Thank You! One Year On

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:39:15 +0000

At the end of July 2019 I decided to posting more regularly to my own blog and on the 5th August 2019 I posted my first video on YouTube. This post is to say thank you to anyone reading this and any other post or watching a video.

I remember being highly amused when I got 25 subscribers and when people I respected in the community re-tweeted my links to blog posts and YouTube videos. I find it amazing that in July 2020 I had almost 9,000 page views of my blog and over 3,400 views of my videos. They can’t all be my dad, can they?

So I would like to thank you, the people who read my blog posts, watched my videos, subscribed, re-tweeted and even tweeted their own tweets regarding my content. I’ve been unbearably happy when my posts have been included in community leader round-ups. It has now become a passion of mine to blog and record videos and every like, comment or smile I get is what I do it for.

If you haven’t yet found my YouTube channel it is athttps://www.youtube.com/lauragbpowerplatform

The Data

But let’s be honest really I like the numbers. The pretty charts that show numbers going up, the ways you can track what is going on it is all fascinating for a data geek like me. Without even loading data into Power BI I can get charts and see progress.

Page views on my blog from Google Analytics

Google Search Console Results

YouTube views

I am no expert on Google analytics and promoting sites etc. Megan Walker has done a great series on setting it up and click here to open it

Advice

When I first started my blog I got one piece of advice from a friend, Pieter Veenstra who has a very successful blog SharePains

Every time you are asked a technical question, write a blog post as the answer.

Pieter Veenstra 2019

I’ve not managed to follow that completly but it has meant I always have topics to blog or record about. I haven’t got organised enough to promise a post every week or a video every week. One pattern I will endeavour to follow though is every video gets a supporting blog post.

So to pass the advice on, if you get asked technical questions, start a blog or YouTube channel.

Thank You to everyone!

The Anxious MVP

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 18:22:41 +0000

The buzz of being nominated for an MVP is great, adding the community activities you do with passion all working towards what is built up to being a huge a goal. Hopefully eventually you get the email we’ve all seen in social media to say you’ve been awarded an MVP. You put out the messages saying how humbled, honoured, happy and other words beginning to h and everyone celebrates with you, you get followed, connected to by people you’ve never heard of and you stick the blue badge everywhere. For me that happened 1st December 2019.

You’re now a member of a community of people who do some amazing things and work extremely hard to make the Microsoft user community what it is. Behind the scenes there is huge amount of work most people never see. Congratulations, life goal achieved.

Then I fell apart. The community is huge, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing and where they were going and I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t really invited, maybe I shouldn’t be there atall. Maybe no-one wants me here.

Why didn’t I reach out to my friends in the community? Anxiety.Why didn’t I reach out to my amazing MVP co-ordinator in the UK? Up to being awarded the MVP in my head she had been the judge I sure as heck wasn’t going to admit she might be wrong.Why did I just hide away? Anxiety

When a community is a busy vibrant community it is fantastic when you know where things are and you’ve found your seat… Until that point for the anxious amongst us, it is as scary as hell. Imagine a scared puppy at Oxford Circus in the pre-Christmas rush, that was me.

I was rescued, Claire my MVP co-ordinator was great when I admitted I was struggling. Various friends helped me out, then a community friend was my sanity and stopped me giving up. I was about to resign my MVP. Thankfully he got his MVP a few days ago, he totally gets the we rise by building up others. A smile, a simple “are you okay?”, stepping back to expand a circle wider to welcome people in, remembering someone’s name, saying hello, were simple actions that helped me. And I hope I do in return for others.

So why write this post? It is not my normal how-to post. I’m aware that I am not alone in struggling with the social side of community. I wanted to make sure people knew they weren’t alone if they felt anxious. More importantly I wanted to reach out to community members to have their radar up for the person who might be struggling. My anxiety is mild, it is real but most of the time few know it exists. I have no history to cause my anxiety, I’m employed, happy family, life is good. Anxiety is just part of my makeup.

My desire to be an MVP was to be a member of the community. What I’ve learnt is I was already a member and people around me wanted me there. No badges required. Okay I’ve learnt that logically, still a way to go to learn that emotionally. I’m not 100% “okay”, I doubt I ever will be, but this is who I am. My anxiety is part of the real me; if I was “fixed” would I be me?