The last few weeks have been quite hectic filled with travel and I’ve been remiss in drafting this post.
On February 28th (which happened to be my birthday), the SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) team announced three new members to their core team. I was one of these three and I’m honored to be considered a member of the core team.
You can read more about the announcement from Microsoft here: Extending SharePoint Patterns and Practices team with new MVP community members
SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) is a nick-name for SharePoint Dev Ecosystem activities coordinated by SharePoint engineering. SharePoint PnP is community driven open source initiative where Microsoft and external community members are sharing their learning’s around implementation practices for SharePoint and Office 365. Active development and contributions happen in GitHub by providing contributions on the samples, reusable components, and documentation.
PnP is owned and coordinated by SharePoint engineering, but this is work done by the community for the community. The initiative is currently facilitated by Microsoft, but already at this point, we have multiple community members as part of the PnP Core team and we are looking to extend the SharePoint PnP Team with more community members. My involvement with the SharePoint PnP core team is founded in three areas I already spend a lot of time in:
- SharePoint Framework
- SharePoint developer documentation
- Office 365 CLI
These are all areas that I don’t just focus on day-to-day, but they are also three areas I’m passionate about. A core part of the PnP group is community contributions. The people involved have done an incredible job in their contributions, but also fostering and promoting community involvement in so many SharePoint development areas. For developers, the world around us has changed so much in the last few years.
I grew up in a world where you protected your work and were careful not to share it without getting paid. As the momentum of open source grew, I changed and now love to have the opportunity to contribute to projects in the open.
Maybe I’m a bit naive, but I think as developers we’ve all become a bit smarter collectively because of this open approach. I’m looking forward to building on the fantastic body of work that the SharePoint PnP Core team members before me have done and live up to this.