Terho Antila on The MVP Show

today's guest is from finland he works as a technology director of cloud driven he received his first m v p award in twenty one you can find him on twitter at terhoantila and his website terhoantila dot com welcome to the show Terho

well thank you very much mark thanks nice to be here

now as an english speaker i'm sure i butched your name because i know that finns swedes and those from norway as well norwegian have very specific is of saying their names tell me how do you how do you to another finish person say your name

ah terhoantila yes

nice

that's very

nice

good there

i like it

it's kind of hard for english speaking

yeah

people usually

before we get started and and how your journey into becoming an m v p happened how you got involved in the power platform and all this great technology tell us about family family in finland for you

i have three kids they're here with me right now actually that's trying not to wake them up yet

yes yes

on so yeah i live in southern finland in a city called loa it's like forty five minutes drive to hell sink from here and yeah my hobby is i play ball ball i bicycle run

nice nice

try to play golf but that's not going very well

yeah i gave up on golf years ago

yes

tell me about food i've you know i've been to russia and i've been to sweden many times but i've never made it to land which is shocking if i was to come there what do you what do you recommend what are your recommendations that i try as like what's your delicacy what's your unique thing that you always and a you know a foreigner to come and try come into your country

well we have great fish dishes but you should definitely go for reindeer

nice

if you never tasted it it's awesome and

the

very

close

unique taste

is that right the closest

the closest

actually i have

call

had reindeer i had it in moscow

had it in moscow okay

yeah yeah yeah we went to a dinner there and arandia was on the menu i remember that now

you like

i loved it

love

loved it yeah yeah ah i like i like gamy food you know that has been caught partically in the wild it's it's always stronger i feel the meat is a stronger flavor than you know farm read animals

absolutely

taste wise tastes

to

okay so tell us how did you how did you get into technology before we get into how you got to the power platform how did you get in your start in technology

oh that's long time ago so yeah i was well actually yeah with my friend when i was like ten years old maybe i had this t magazine coming every month or so in the mail box and then we to they have this was it basic programming language serious that we started browsing through and we copied letters from from the pages of the magazine over to my uh computer commodore one twenty eight

wow

that was

wow

and that was why my first programming experience and basically i've been doing some sort of programming ever since

wow then what was that pivotal point that you got involved in an microsopf business applications what was the first kind of application you got because you know there's a big suite of applications in there from dynamic through to all the power platform components what was your first one that you kind of picked up and started using

yeah i would say it was maybe four four or five years ago with power as there was a need need for customers to create some related a

okay

and i was working working for them for a couple of months doing that so that was my first real real real time experience with with power as of course i was i had been testing it out earlier and getting acquainted with it but that was the first real solution

m so you obviously advanced a long way because i've seen your gantt chart too your it's your piece of control right

yeah

and it is a work of art it looks phenomenal as a tool tell us about how you got into building that

building that

and and your journey with p c f

well actually that's funny thing because the i just mentioned that was my first real time real real power up it had a similar component didn't have planner as a back back end but or data source but it did have that some sort of similar gaunt view in it and then maybe a little bit over a year ago i noticed some people talking in facebook group about hey how can we have how can we get gantt chart on planner because that's something that is missing actually they have

wow

planner

yeah

to get the gantt

wow

chart

yeah yeah i didn't realize so many

and then i thought i did do something similar earlier could i do that using nor that's it kind data source and then i just started mah doing it yeah and while doing it my colleague actually asked that hey would you be interesting in trying for n p reward

wow

so they sort of like both ideas sort of supported each other so as

like it tell me how much response have you got around that planet gantt chart

it's uh it has been poplar unfortunately i don't have any numbers because it's sitting right there in getup and everyone can just use and download it

yes yes

so i don't have statistics but i think people use it a lot because my block is getting quite a few hits and around half of them are about those

wow

block posts related to that concert

it's amazing that's amazing we've obviously just recently had a

recently

big power platform of bent in berlin and were you involved in that

yeah just got back last sunday from berlin

nice

nice trip i had a session there yeah that was about the new power upscanmas altering feature where you can actually finally

yeah

have multiple multiple makers editing the same app at the same time

how mature is it that coauthoring feature

my opinion is that it's it's getting quite mature i had some some problems with it at some point i might have lost all my screens all of a sudden in the in the kind studio but then of course everything was stored in get so i was able to get back to the working version yeah i'm not sure when it's going to but when it does i'm i'm definitely going to use it then it looks

oh

like it's going to be very solid check

oh in a nutshell

i actually yep

and so what does it do i know co authors in the name but just just tell

basically

me about some of the features of it

the features of it when you turn that feature on when you re editing your canvas app in the studio when you turn the feature on ah you hook it up get repository and all whenever it changes the ap the integration extract it and pushes the source code files into the repository and if you have some other maker editing the same app they will get they're refreshed with your changes

excellent excellent

yeah it is

true coal therein tell me about did you notice any difference between becoming an m v p n before you were in m v p like were you surprised about anything once you got awarded and got invited into the m v p program

well yes i was for example i didn't know anything about h b g i groups that i had direct i have now i have direct channel with the product groups that i can if i have any questions or problems there's a help really close also the the bee community is great and actually that berlin trip was very special for me because that was actually the first time i actually saw someone in person some other m ps so it was like really nice to network in berlin

how many went down from finland

yeah uh from finland we had three four per centers

i think i saw one of the photos was that right did it go down

at and we had also temopertila there and our seroundim was sort of like organizing the events and

so

of

good

course there were some customers also from fieland attending

nice what was the high light

it was

of

a high

it

light well my high light was definitely my only my first in person session other than that i would say that meeting people finally after all these covet years it was really fun

crazy

there were no masks anything so it felt normal

on monday of this week in easter monday i take my first flight in over two years which for me you know prior to that i was living in london before this all happened and i'd come back to new zealand and and yeah to have no

to

connection no physical connection for so long you know that we used to get around all the events particularly europe you know has a lot of great events that you can go to and it's easy to go you know that's why i went to sweden so many times i was speaking at the user group up there and um and you know a lot of friends in sweden um and then and similar to norway there was always speaking opportunities there and one thing i have and i haven't hit anty up about this what's happening in finland

telling

to put it

he's

on

gonna

a big event and we're all going to come

go

and do you

and

know and this is before covid of course knocked everything out but what's the community like in finland around the power platform

well we do have this made up actually we have session today and it's like monthly made up so far it's been online but i've been organizing it since since my triumph for p but we are now trying to get even more active so that we could organize in person events as well

nice nice

and trying to find some social platform for finish people to discuss power platform related stuff in finish

yeah i think it's so important that it's done in the native language like you know

yeah

as a

for many people

yeah

it's way a lot easier to start

absolutely

discussing for

yeah that's good that you're on that journey to finding that before i let you go because our time is drawing to an end tell me about what advice you would have to people um you know particularly developers and i'm talking about pro code developers here getting getting in to p c f using p c f and you know developing really new potential inter face components that are not there like you know as i say yours looks phenomenal i see how people would want to interact

help

with that

people want to

what's your advice

act with

around

it

somebody going on that journey what steps should they take what should they think about what advice would you give them

well well i must say that actually my gantt chart is not p c f so it's just native

i

power as

so so

controls there

so is it is it like so how when you say it's not p c f how is it as a component how is it used how is it is it like as a web serve as sorry is it aware part what

no it's it's a ready made app m connect to your planner and then you can see your planner plans on the concert

right so why don't you turn into a p c f control

you turn into a piece of control well it can can be can be turned into pic control if you well i need to do some react on jobfscriptcoding

correct

if i want to create the p f so i wanted to do that as low code so there's no java script involved in developing that

well wow interesting interesting well it's been a absolute pleasure to have you on the show i can't wait to get my invite

can't wait to get

to the

invited

big event happening in finland around the power platform hopefully the next twelve to twenty

hopeful

four months

the yeah definitely hey thanks for having me here

pleasure pleasure