Microsoft Corp. awarded BSH Chief Technology Officer Branimir Giurov with the 2004 Most Valuable Professional Award (MVP) in the “Visual Developer - Visual C#” category.
Giurov has been among the three Bulgarian professionals to receive this tribute of excellence. With this move, Bulgaria sustains its MVP presence for a third successive year, the number of awarded Bulgarians growing correspondingly.
The MVP award goes to outstanding individuals, who excel not only in technical expertise in a specific Microsoft technical field, but also take due care to disseminate in good will their knowledge to peers through seminars, training sessions, newsgroups and live knowledge-sharing.
For the past year, Giurov has laid his input by actively participating in newsgroups and lecturing at Microsoft training sessions and internal BSH educational modules.
Giurov will enjoy a full award kit pertaining to MVPs. In November, he will be traveling to the IT Forum, scheduled to take place in November in Copenhagen, Denmark and will join the “Ask the Expert” session. The forum is organized by Microsoft and is cost-free for MVPs. In April 2005, he will participate in the Redmond-based MVP Summit, where all MVP individuals will have the opportunity to meet live and share experience and ideas. Further, he will get access to the MVP-only online community, the MVP learning centers, along with the technical resources pertaining to his field of competence.
Giurov is firm to build on his self-learning and teaching initiatives. In the coming year, he intends to co-lecture at the Sofia University and educate second- and third-year students in Microsoft technologies. According to him, Bulgarian education does not provide enough practical knowledge to students, which makes transition of graduating programmers to real work conditions a painful process.
“I hope this course will smooth out this transition process,” Giurov says.
Additionally, Giurov intends to further develop the Bulgarian Microsoft user group he initiated months ago. He hopes it will gradually evolve to a one-stop spot for professionals searching for advice and such willing to share information and their personal findings. Giurov hopes that this and related initiatives will further aid software developers raise their qualifications and restore Bulgaria’s status as a first-tier technical excellence and outsourcing destination.
