Today’s blog features a true local, meet Cathrine Bruvold, who calls our Nordic Summit 2024 host city Oslo home!
About Cathrine
Cathrine lives in Oslo, Norway, where she is the Head of Power Platform at Point Taken. Outside of tech, she’s deeply passionate about chess, as both a player and commentator. ♟️
Community Engagement
Cathrine is a familiar face in the Power Platform community, regularly speaking and volunteering at conferences across the globe. This year alone, she has appeared at the Tallinn Power Platform Townhall conference, ColorCloud, BizApps Summit and EPPC. She will also be speaking at Nordic Summit in Gothenburg 🥳 and the PPCC this autumn.
At our Gothenburg event, she is co-presenting Optimizing Canvas Apps for Maintainability, Reusability and Performance with Daniel Laskewitz and leading a pre-day workshop with Joe Griffin titled Designing Beautiful Apps for Functional Makers: A Masterclass in Fusing Power Apps Capabilities.
She is also planning to launch her own blog and has already written a ton of helpful insights, just waiting to decide where to publish it!
Fun Facts from Cathrine
Cathrine’s curiosity knows no limits, she is learning Chinese just because she thinks languages are cool! And then there are these unforgettable anecdotes:
On directions: “I do look at myself as an intelligent woman, but man, I struggle with left and right. Even during my driver’s test, I made the wrong turn.”
On rhythm: “My rhythm is so bad that when I’m part of a clapping audience, I miss the beat. The best part? I once auditioned to play drums in the school band. Still waiting to hear back from them…”
On travel oops-moments: “Once I flew to Stavanger from Oslo for work, and I accidentally dropped a banana peel in a man’s lap while trying to drop it in the stewardess’s trash cart. Our eyes met and it got really embarrassing when I didn’t know if I should pick it up or not.”
On learning by doing: “My first ever Power Apps canvas app was built on data using Finance and Operations, I then learned quickly that experts are not always experts, but juniors learning what buttons to click.”
Nordic Summit 2024
Cathrine highlights the variety of speakers and sessions and the quality of the content delivered. She also mentions how great it is to be able to learn, networking and having fun all at the same time!
Overall thoughts “It’s a great Nordic conference, I knew a lot of people that were going and that to me meant that the conference is of great quality. I also really enjoy being social at events and conferences and Nordic Summit allows you to meet great people and learn a lot while enjoining yourself.”
Best session “10 Power FX tricks that you didn’t know you needed, delivered by Jon Vöge and Chris Hansen. “That was awesome. The guys presenting were really well prepared, funny and easy to understand, making it easy to learn. So I learned and brushed up on some information regarding functions in Power Apps which was really great to see how they would use different functions in expressions.”
Final thoughts “I met Daniel Laskewitz again, he’s so great and knowledgeable. His session was super nice to attend, learned a lot from him about Agents. Also I got to spend quality time with the amazing and impressive Joe Griffin. Always smiling and super kind as one of the first people I got to know in the community. Mira Razman I met for the first time. What an amazing and energetic woman. I am left in awe after meeting her. She does so much great and volunteer for so many conferences while also organising DynamicMinds. I love to see other women thrive and fill up the tech space. We had so much fun together! I need to say the Photo Booth was so cool! That was really fun.”
Favourite part of the platform
Cathrine focuses on the entire stack of components in the Power Platform except Power Pages, but Power Apps and Power Automate have her heart.
She mentions how she really enjoy-to-build solutions that utilise the real strengths of low-code and the synergies between the components in Power Platform:
“Combining Dataverse, model-driven apps, canvas apps, custom pages, custom connectors, Power BI, Power Automate etc. making really fun and useful smaller solutions that the customer really sees the value in, both as a user-friendly solution, but also when it comes to the business value.”
Thank you Cathrine for attending Nordic Summit 2024 as speaker and for sharing your experience here with us along with all other insights and fun facts! We’re looking forward to seeing you in September and also to see in the future how your own blog evolves! ✨
The Nordic Summit Team