The Dutchman of Data Dunked on Me, w/ Kasper de Jonge

Kasper de Jonge's areas of expertise are many-Business Intelligence, Power BI, DAX, PowerPivot, General BI, Datawarehouse, SSIS, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, SQL Server, and you can include a mean basketball crossover to that list!

As Analytics Advisor and Principal Program Manager of Power BI, he knows a great deal about the problems that BI customers face daily.  He shares some of these experiences and his expertise, and we have some good laughs along the way as well!

Check out Kasper's awesome blog Kasper on BI

References In This Episode:

Inglorious Bastards Italian Scene

Episode Timeline:

• 2:45 - A basketball challenge in New Orleans, Kasper's MS history with Power Pivot and Power BI, and the culture change at Microsoft
• 15:45 - The culture shock in moving to the United States
• 28:50 - The death of Power BI V1, and some James Phillips stories
• 40:00 - Office VS the Freedom to Innovate, Excel/Power BI Integration, and how software development has evolved
• 51:15 - The Amazing Power BI Cat Team, and the processes that they use to solve problems
• 1:05:50 - Some bad Microsoft product names, DAX VS MDX, and the many different people that are in IT

Episode Transcript:

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. This week's guest is Kasper, Kasper DJ. I call him Kasper DJ here because I'm completely unable to pronounce his last name. But anyone that's been following this community for a while, if I just say Kasper, you know who I'm talking about, don't you?

Rob Collie (00:00:15): Now, I met Kasper over the internet in 2010. This was shortly after I had relocated from Seattle to Cleveland for family reasons. And during 2010 is when I started to say something I thought was pretty funny at the time which is I have more friends in foreign countries than I do in the city I live. It was a very strange departure to suddenly be part of an international community on the outside of Microsoft all sort of coalescing around this thing called Power Pivot.

Rob Collie (00:00:43): It was right around then in early 2010 about the same time that I was getting to know Kasper that I had seen something in Power Pivot that told me that the world was going to change. And most people that I talked to about that I told that Power Pivot which became Power BI was going to revolutionize the BI industry and change the way it was staffed, changed the way that the projects were, changed the whole business model.

Rob Collie (00:01:05): The overwhelming majority of people that I said that to would immediately reject it and almost like attacked me. They told me I was wrong. Those days are over so long ago that it's hard to even really kind of remember what that was like. But Kasper was really striking back then. He had been part of the traditional BI ecosystem. And he was good at it. And he was seeing the same things in Power Pivot in those early days that I was.

Rob Collie (00:01:27): And that was like instant international nerd bonding. He's gone on to do some amazing things. He ended up working on Power Pivot/Power BI at Microsoft for a greater number of years than I did when the dust settled. Today, he's still at Microsoft. He's now part of the Power BI CAT team. And he's a deservedly well-known and well-respected member of the Power BI and Power Platform Community at large.

Rob Collie (00:01:50): Unlike me, Kasper had a ringside seat during some very, very transformative years at Microsoft. When the culture of the software teams was being completely remade around continuous release rather than the two-year, three-year waterfall cycles, he was there for the transition to Satya and the cultural changes that brought and the strategy pivot from Power Pivot to Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:02:15): We talked about all those t