Cathrine's Corner on Cathrine Wilhelmsen

Celebrating 10 Years as a Microsoft MVP!

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0200

On July 10th, I received my 10th MVP Award! 🤩 I became a Microsoft Data Platform MVP 2024-2025 in the Data Integration and Microsoft Fabric technology areas 🤓

(My puppy, Pixel, couldn’t care less. But she’s really cute! So I decided to pose with her instead of a piece of MVP swag 😁)

10 years. Ten. Years. Holy moly. I still remember the thrill and panic of receiving my first MVP Award. Back then, I felt like I didn’t really deserve an award. I saw myself as a shy nobody, definitely not a most valuable professional! But I was also proud and extremely grateful to be recognized for what I had done for my local community.

First Day as a Solutions Architect in Evidi!

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 16:00:00 +0200

Nope, I did not get a new job 😄 But! My company has officially merged with four other awesome companies into one super awesome company, and I got a promotion! I’m happy to announce that I’m now a Solutions Architect in Evidi, yay 🥳

New Employer: Evidi

We used to be Skill, AITC, Communicate, eSeven, and Pilaro. Today, we are finally Evidi, one of Norway’s largest independent consulting companies with over 300 people specialized on Microsoft technologies. Our name comes from evidence and reflects the importance of data-driven decisions.

First Day as a Senior Consultant in Skill!

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0100

Today is a very special day. It’s Monday, it’s a new week, and it’s a new month - all sorts of new beginnings. The most important new beginning, however, is that today is my first day as a Senior Consultant in the Data Management and Analytics team in Skill! Yay 🥳

Skill is a Norwegian IT consulting company with over 100 consultants working from two locations. They have teams focused on everything from cloud infrastructure to cloud productivity, from security to business applications, and from collaboration to analytics.

How migrating from WordPress to Hugo has helped me refocus and enjoy blogging again

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 21:50:00 +0200

It’s been one month since I migrated from WordPress to Hugo. In my original post, I mentioned some of the immediate benefits of migrating: I saved money, performance went up, and I was totally geeking out about getting to learn new skills. It was all about the tech, really. Today, I want to reflect on some of the less obvious benefits and how migrating has had a positive impact on me this past month 😊

I think I can summarize it in one sentence:

I enjoy blogging again because I’ve taken back control of my website.

That sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? I mean, this has always been my website and I have always been in control of it. But what I’ve realized is that for many years, WordPress and its features and plugins shaped how I used - and didn’t use - my blog.

I can’t and I don’t really blame WordPress. This is mostly about my habits and thought processes and how I started changing them. However, that change only happened because I migrated to a new blogging platform. It was only after I started using Hugo that I realized how I could do things differently.

So what’s different now?

Goodbye WordPress, Hello Hugo!

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 16:15:00 +0200

Long story short: I’ve been working intensely on my website for about a month. After a couple of years of thinking about moving away from Wordpress, I finally did it! I’m so excited and so happy to be up and running on a brand new platform. Hello Hugo! 🤓

What’s new!?

For you, very little has changed. You may notice a few things, like:

New dark theme available! (Click the button in the menu to switch between themes 👆🏻)
Improved performance, especially on mobile devices
Comments are gone

For me, everything has changed:

Saved money by eliminating expensive web hosting
Complete control of all functionality and code
Access to local development environment
New workflow using Hugo, GitHub and Netlify

This has been a massive project for me. I’ve worked day and night for weeks, I’ve learned new concepts and technologies and coding languages, and I’ve loved every minute of it 🤓

My Yeps and Nopes for Balancing Work and Life (T-SQL Tuesday #141)

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 13:30:00 +0200

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by TJay Belt (@tjaybelt). 2020 and 2021 brought changes for many of us, and TJay wants to know what we have learned, tried, or implemented for balancing work and life during this time. This is an interesting topic for me because I absolutely failed at it in 2020. It was only a few months into 2021 that I started figuring things out for myself. In this post, I will be sharing and explaining the yeps and nopes I have implemented for myself while working from home.

(Side note: After figuring out how to spell dos and don’ts, and deciding that all of the correct options look weird, I chose to use “yeps and nopes” instead. Just… just roll with it 😅)

Personal Highlights from 2019

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 18:55:56 +0100

It’s December 31st, 2019. WHAAAAAT? 🤯 I have no idea how we’re almost in 2020, but here we are! Just a few hours left of the year. (Hi to my friends around the world who are already in 2020! 👋🏻) Like many others, I enjoy reflecting on the year that’s almost over. This year, I’ve decided to collect some of my highlights from 2019.

(Warning! There will be lots of tweets and pictures.)

Bullying, triggers, reactions, and reflections

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 22:13:41 +0100

After spending a week at MVP Summit with old and new friends, I feel energized. My brain has been refilled with lots of happy memories 😊

And one not-so-happy memory:

One. Just one negative experience during an otherwise fantastic week. One negative experience that objectively really wasn’t that big of a deal, followed by an absolutely overwhelming number of replies full of love and support. (Thank you 💙) And yet, this one negative experience has dominated my thoughts and feelings for days.

It’s easy to say that I refuse to let one stranger and one negative experience take over and push my happy memories away. Actually doing it is a whole different situation. No matter how determined I am or how much support I get, dealing with an experience like this is never easy for me.

I have trained my brain for many years to respond in a certain way, to gnaw at the negative even when it’s surrounded by positive. That habit does not change overnight just because I want it to. It’s something I need to actively work on to improve, and that requires determination and effort over time.

Writing is my way of dealing with things like this. Structuring my thoughts, describing my feelings, and reflecting on why I reacted the way I did is all part of my process.

I’m very aware that my social media accounts are mostly highlight reels. I choose to focus on the positive things in my life, and so what most people see is the happy, bubbly, super excited version of me. I wish life was like that all the time 😊 But it’s not. Most days are not. Some days, you get flat out told that you suck, and instead of being strong and brushing it off, you end up crying and withdrawing from everything and everyone.

And that’s ok. That’s life. We’re flawed, and if we weren’t flawed, we wouldn’t be human. But being human also means we have choices. We can choose to take responsibility for our own feelings, get back up, try to learn from our experiences, and keep going.

Writing helps me. If I can also help someone else by sharing this publicly, whether it is helping one person understand why someone can react strongly to something seemingly small, or showing another person that they’re not alone in experiencing similar feelings, I will count that as a double win 😊

So what happened?

Dealing with Disappointment and Learning from Failures

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 19:35:33 +0100

I have written posts in the past about how to deal with technical failures as a speaker: Be prepared. Have backups of your files. Take screenshots or videos of your demos. Rehearse presenting your session with and without your slide deck. I have made plenty of I-wasn’t-prepared-for-that mistakes in the past, and I learned from them.

Last weekend was different. I was supposed to do a precon and a session at SQLSaturday Nashville. I didn’t experience any technical failures. I experienced what felt very much like personal failures.

On Friday, our precon got canceled due to weather.

On Saturday, no one showed up to my session.

I had not prepared for either of those things to happen, and I definitely had not prepared for both of those things to happen on the same weekend. I went through a whole range of emotions in a short amount of time, from embarrassment to disappointment to amusement.

Since then, I have debated with myself about whether or not to write this blog post. I have written and re-written it several times. I did not want to write a blog post full of whining and complaining, but I did want to share my experience as a reminder to both myself and others that:

These things happen. It’s ok to feel disappointed, but don’t let it stop you from trying again.
There is always something positive to take away from a negative experience.
Life is full of ups and downs. Social media (especially my own) often focus on the ups, but life is not amazing all the time.

If you only needed a few reminders, feel free to stop reading here 😊 The rest of the post is quite long and a little more like a journal entry, really.

I'm a BimlHero Certified Expert

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 14:30:40 +0100

In April 2015 I set a goal to become a Certified Expert in Biml. On February 1st, 2016, I became the second BimlHero in the world - the first woman and the first in Europe 🤓

It has been a long journey, and I have loved every part of it! Varigence announced the certification program in March 2015, and in April I decided to go for it. I was accepted into the program, and in June I attended 8 hours of advanced training. I spent the next six months working on my Biml solution. I was unable to work full-time on it due to other tasks and responsibilities at work, so I spent quite a lot of time on it at home as well. In November I completed the BimlHero Certified Expert Test, and in December I submitted my Biml solution and my case study of how I implemented the solution at work. In January Varigence reviewed my test, solution and case study, and in February I had the final code review with Scott Currie. It was very nerve-wracking having the creator of Biml go through my code! 😅 But I received lots of useful feedback and finally a congratulations on passing and becoming a BimlHero.

Goodbye 2015, hello 2016!

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 22:58:25 +0100

Happy New Year 2016! 🥳

2015 was a year of highs and lows for me. I did so many things for the first time and really pushed myself out of my comfort zone. I made new friends and grew closer to old friends. At the same time I struggled more than ever with my old enemies depression, insomnia, migraine and impostor syndrome. All in all, I guess you can call it “life” 😊

Takeoff! Launching cathrinewilhelmsen.net

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:00:18 +0100

Today, I will be marking my calendar with a bright color. (Probably pink.) I’m taking a plunge into the world known as “The Internet” and launching cathrinewilhelmsen.net! It’s quite exciting to have my own little place online 🤓

I have a few reasons for launching cathrinewilhelmsen.net. The first reason is entirely selfish: I want to tell everyone hi, hello, my name is Cathrine, this is who I am and this is what I like to do. The second reason is because I want a place where I can learn and experiment with web design and web development. And the third reason is that I want to keep a tiny library of useful links and code snippets and tips and tricks.