John Pepper

What has been your personal highlight of 2020?

Realising that I enjoy working from home. Don't get me wrong, I love being in the office surrounded by the team, but with modern tools I will probably never return to five days in the office again. We can all get so much done remotely. Prior to 18 March I spent nearly every working day away from home.

Which three celebrities would you invite to a Zoom party?

It would have to be three amazing musicians as I have really missed live music and festivals this year.

What has been your guiltiest lockdown pleasure?

Eating. Too much. Also learning to code. I wanted to learn a language such as Spanish or German before the age of 50. However, with travel restricted now and possibly well into the future I thought… hmm, let me learn a programming language instead. So if anybody has any very basic Python3 requirements I am your man!

Which tech figurehead has inspired you most this year, and why?

Satya Nadella. Could we have been this productive during the pandemic without his vision, foresight and leadership through the past six years to build the scalable platform we all work on every day and even take for granted?

What piece of technology, or app, have you not been able to do without during the pandemic?

Teams/Zoom etc. Plus of course my Coding for Dummies app.

If you could be anyone else for a week, who would you be and what would you do?

This may be corny, but right now I wouldn't want to.

Do you miss face-to-face events?

Teams and Zoom meetings are a welcome stopgap, but no true substitute for face-to-face events and I do miss them.

How will COVID leave its mark on the way the channel operates long term?

Working from the office is now a privilege. We and our customers are adapting to that and it will have a lasting effect on the channel and our customers forever. All of that is a positive change that brings a lot of new opportunities.