Category: Events

Jun16201916 June 20191 February 20200Commentby Gregor Suttie

Scottish Summit 2020

Posted in Azure, AzureDevOps, Events

On February 29th 2020, we are hosting a brand new, FREE event here in Scotland, UK which is called the Scottish Summit which will have several tracks running.

We are bringing over 60 sessions to you covering multiple tracks as per below:-

  • Dynamics for Customer Engagement
  • Azure
  • Big Data
  • Power Platform
  • Microsoft ERP
  • Personal Development
  • SharePoint
  • Office 365

To find out more about the event you can view the website and see the list of speakers.

I am giving  a talk titled “Super charge your Azure learning” where I will cover how I have learned Azure and go over all the very best resources I have came across in the last 18 months of learning Azure. This talk will be for all levels, people getting started, people who know some Azure and want to learn a bit more, right up to Azure experts who might want to branch out their learning into new areas.

Topics will include:-

  • My Journey
  • Getting started learning Azure
  • Azure Services
  • Azure Devops
  • Exams
  • Top tips and best learning resources
  • And much more

I cant wait to welcome people from around the world to the Scottish Summit and hopefully you catch the world premier of my talk.

If you wish to attend then grab your FREE ticket – hope to see you there!


Mar0820198 March 20198 March 20192Commentsby Gregor Suttie

Tips for Running a User Group

Posted in Azure, Events

A couple of people have asked for some tips on running an Azure user group, I help out with the Glasgow Azure User Group, I don’t run it  the awesome Sarah Lean runs it and does all the hard work, I just help out.

Instead of replying I thought I may as well blog some tips and collate other people’s tips going forward, so here is a list of tips on running a User Group.

  • Try and create a brand for it, think name, website url, logo etc.
  • Use Meetup or Eventbrite, although Meetup seems to be the most popular
  • Get your User Group added to lists of similar typed of User Group in the region
  • Try and generate interest from speakers as far in advance as possible, have a backup plan just in case speakers cancel last-minute (we all have busy lives)
  • Tweet information about the event and use LinkedIn and Facebook to get the User Group name out there
  • MVP’s need to deliver talks to help them maintain their MVP status and are always looking for places to deliver talks
  • Try and get sponsors for your User Group, they might help pay for food and drinks for your attendees
  • Always thanks your sponsors if you have them, they help you keep the User Group running normally
  • Folks always like swag, stickers especially, ask around and see who can get you stickers for your User Group
  • If your running a conference or event I use sessionize, and I recommend it if you’re organising an event
  • Last but not realise your doing a lot to help the community by organising and running a User Group, it’s not easy, so try to get help with it, good luck.

Please leave feedback and your tips after the beep…


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Jan20201920 January 201920 January 20193Commentsby Gregor Suttie

Ask Me Anything with Scott Gu – If Carlsberg did meetings…

Posted in Azure, Events

Mid December 2018, I received a DM on twitter from a new follower @deanbryen which was basically read like so –

Hey Gregor! I know you’ve been doing a ton of stuff with the Azure community both in Scotland and online. Thanks for that!!

We’re organising a small (10-15 people) private event for top UK tech community members to attend an AMA with Scott Guthrie in January. I added you to the list of invitees, so this is me inviting you 🙂

What:  ‘Azure AMA (ask me anything) with Scott’ An opportunity to have a closed-door discussion with Scott Guthrie on the state of cloud in the UK

So on Friday 18th January I went down to London to the Microsoft Reactor and met with Scott Guthrie to ask him question’s on the status of Azure in the UK – an Ask Me Anything session – not gonna lie I was super excited by this opportunity.

Firstly it was amazing to get recognised as someone with a passion for Azure and be recognised, it felt like a reward for all the hard work I put in with blogging, user group, helping other people and giving feedback on Microsoft products etc. – I get a lot of people saying their inspired by how I took to learning Azure and how they want to do the same.

The meeting was just after 11am, Scott introduced himself and the products and teams he manages, he spoke about .Net, Azure, GitHub, AI, Data and more and if you think about that, that is a huge amount of people and projects to be responsible for.

One thing that struck me was his passion for it and his in-depth knowledge of where the teams are, what’s planned ahead, even down to the release dates for the vnext in these products.  GitHub was mentioned a good few times and with Microsoft purchasing it he talked about how recognised how people might react but he knows that GitHub will get even better moving forward for all types of developer’s.

Microsoft want to keep old friends and make new friends and that’s an awesome way to run a company.

It’s not every day your sat in a meeting with the Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft.

If your interested to know what Scott is like in person, he’s relaxed, friendly, very engaging, loves hearing feedback (good and bad), and a very nice person indeed, he talks openly and honestly about everything he and Microsoft is doing and how they give back as well.

We talked about a lot of stuff within an hour and here is a list of the things I can remember in the conversation: –

  • Staff Training and how to get staff trained at a professional level for moving to the cloud
  • Azure Governance and how companies can have policies in place
  • Azure Security Centre
  • The new Azure portal homepage and the layout etc – I asked can we customise it (that’s in the pipeline)
  • Containers in Azure, Kubernetes etc
  • Data Centre’s and Carbon footprints as well as renewable energy
  • Microsoft Learn and byte size learning and how its effective and how its been well received
  • Events like Build and Ignite and how the new Ignite events are being well received
  • Cloud Advocates and more regional / local events coming, more Ignite local events coming
  • Visual Studio code and how popular it has become
  • Managed Service Identity (MSI) and how its being built-in more and more going forward into Azure
  • Python tooling that’s coming and how it will be best in class

A lot of the we above we spoke about and these are just my recollection of the main topics that came up, yes we could have stayed there all day asking Scott questions but we had a limited time with him as you can imagine, with more time I’d like to have know what a day-to-day normal day involves.

Before Scott left I managed to introduce myself and grab a selfie which was awesome, not a day or meeting I will forget about anytime soon, If Carlsberg did meetings…

Lastly huge thanks to @deanbryen for the invite, Anna Fear for organising and to the UK Cloud Advocates who I spoke with when we had lunch together.

 

 

 

 


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Apr21201821 April 201821 April 20180Commentby Gregor Suttie

Global Azure Bootcamp – Glasgow April 21st 2018

Posted in Azure, Cloud Computing, Events, Logic Apps, Pluralsight, Pro Tips, Training

Saturday April 21st was the day for the Azure Global Bootcamp which say people attend user groups all around the world as you can see below, so we all spent a day as the Azure community learning all about Azure in many different ways from speakers all around the globe.

I took part and my talk was on learning Azure and becoming ready for the exams into the bargain.

 

 

 

As promised here are my slides:- HowToLearnAzure3

The Glasgow event was awesome and we also had Analben Mehta talking about serverless and Azure Functions and then we had Kenny Lowe talking about Azure Stack, great content and lunch and beers/soft drinks provided, all in all great to be apart of and hopefully people enjoyed they’re day.

Hope to see the people attended at the next Glasgow Azure User Group.


Feb11201811 February 201811 February 20181Commentby Gregor Suttie

DDDScotland Restrospective

Posted in Events

Developer Day Scotland (@DDDScot) was on Saturday 10th Feb 2018 and was fabulously organised by @crgrieve, @AndrewdeRozario and @ChristosMatskas at a great venue Paisley University in Paisley @UniWestScotland near Glasgow. The even was kindly sponsored by StreamBA, ScreenMedia, Aspose, Net Talent, MBN Recruitment, JetBrains, NDC Conferences, Arnold Clark, Product Forge, Endjin and J.P. Morgan.

I attended the following talks:-

  • Containers jumpstart from a DevOps perspective by @MattVSTS
  • Breaking the Myths Around Artificial Intelligence by @galiyawarrier
  • Secure in Cloud Native by @robinem
  • Beyond C# 7.0 point releases reference semantics and nullablity by @citizenmatt
  • Learning Kotlin as a C# developer by @joe_stead
  • Adding a layer of Chocolate(y) by @gep13

I had a fantastic time and look forward to the next one, Was also great meeting all of the people I managed to speak to, and I also finally meet @tourismgeek.

Many thanks to each and every the sponsors, there were some nice prices won too!

I’ll add more on each talk later today.


Feb27201627 February 201627 February 20161Commentby Gregor Suttie

My company’s 2 day hackathon

Posted in Events, Ideas, Productivity, Training

Last week at work we did an offsite hackathon over 2 days offsite at Skillsmatter which is in Central London, the idea was to get offsite and brainstorm ideas around how we can benefit our users and add more value to the product we work on.

The hackathon included everyone from the team including UX designers, QA testers, Developers and Product Owners, and we had a clear vision which was our goal for the 2 days.

I had never been to a hackathon or anything like it before and I wont go into too much detail but the following is what we did for 2 days, how we went about it and perhaps you can take some ideas from it and do your own similar thing at your company or with your team.

hackathon

Ground Rules

Define some grounds rules at the start and try to respect them over the 2 days.

Day 1

  • No electronics allowed (i.e. mobiles or Ipad’s), except your laptop.
  • No ideas are silly.
  • Only one person speaks at anytime.
  • Elmos – Enough Lets Move On (if one person talks for too long).
  • HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion, highest paid person in the office) – everyone’s opinion has same value and weight, bosses don’t make the decisions.
  • Parking Lot – area where some ideas aren’t thrown out but places on this part of the whiteboard for later on future discussions perhaps.

After we set some ground rules we split into teams and individually wrote down all of our ideas for ways to try to meet our vision and then we discussed and grouped them into similar types. From there we decided we had 3 ideas which we then whittled down to 2, we split into teams and started with some sprint planning in each team.

After we planned out our ideas we then started work using small 1.5 hour sprints, each sprint ending with a sprint retrospective and show and tell to the other team, here we gave feedback to the other team and discussed the good and the bad and the potential with each idea etc.

Day 1 lasted from 8:30 am to around about 6pm I think it was and it was a pretty long day but super awesome fun.

Day 2

Day 2 started again with some sprint planning, figuring out what we wanted to achieve and splitting out tasks for each person in the team to have something to work on and something to produce at the end of the sprint. Some people worked on the UI design, developers worked on the code, testers wrote some test and wire frames were also created by the Product Owners and some of the designers too.

I’ll skip to the most important part of the 2 days and what I personally took away from the 2 day workshop/hackathon.

What did we produce

After the 2 days we came away with 2 separate pieces of work which met our vision and will definitely improve our product, we had working code, it was tested, it looked pretty good and with a couple of days work would be production ready.

Lessons Learnt

  • Working in a different way to our normal 2 week sprints was awesome, having everyone in the team, all together, working around a table, throwing ideas out, dismissing some and getting instant feedback resulted in rapid feature creation from start to finish, in 1.5 days of actually doing the work we had something not far off production ready.
  • Instant Feedback – Feedback from everyone right there and then was key to delivering something we all thought worked, and would benefit our end users.
  • Every single person had a voice, every single person had their own ideas and collaborating together to pull the best parts of these ideas together was something which we don’t always get to do.
  • Offsite – being away from work and not having the disruptions of email/meetings/phonecall’s in a nice big building with areas to go eat and relax for a bit helped a lot.
  • Writing down all the ideas, being able to group them together and see the most popular ideas helped drive the towards picking the ideas to work on.
  • Being able to have everyone at the same level and not have the boss have the final say was quite an interesting take on it and one which I think everyone welcomed.
  • This will hopefully change the way we do larger pieces of work going forward in our sprints, getting everyone together and brain storming ideas, designs and getting instant feedback and rapid development so that we can take a piece of work and deliver more over 1 sprint rather than breaking the same piece of work over say 2 sprints.

Summary
I’d recommend your team try something like this, keep it organised, keep it simple, everyone is equal in the room, set ground rules, have a vision or a goal your all attempting to try to reach and have fun, the best part of the 2 days it was fun, we were discussing it all week afterwards and every single person loved it.

We covered a lot more than this but I don’t want to bore people with all the details – if you want to ask me anything about this post add a comment.

Thanks
Gregor


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Feb18201618 February 201619 February 20162Commentsby Gregor Suttie

MSWebDay – What I took away from it

Posted in Best Practices, Events, JavaScript, KnockoutJS, MVC, NuGet, Training

Today, Feb 16th, I attended MSWebdevday ran by Microsoft in Glasgow which was an event covering all things web related from Microsoft, the speakers were @christosmatskas, @thebeebs and @martinkearn and was an all day event.

The Schedule for the day covered various topics and it was great to learn so many new things and get my first glimpse at some new technologies, I always love learning something new, and I even sat next to the illustrious Gary Ewan Park, someone who I have chatted to a few times on twitter but not every managed to meet.

Ok so lets cover the actual event:-

The first talk was by on What’s New in ASP.Net Core 1.0 and was a tour of the new features, how to get it, how to use it, whats new, whats no longer there and he also talked about how you can just take the files and drop them into a folder when deploying, there’s no gac, you can just deploy the Core files in a folder alongside your code, this is very neat, its cross-platform, and it means you could have the same site running under different version of Core going forward should you choose to or need to have this.

The second Talk was Building with JavaScript Task Runners, this was mainly about how to get gulp, how to set it up and how to run some tasks to minify your css, javascript files and all that good stuff, how to add it into Visual Studio as a build step after you compile your code, showed an example gulp file and lots more.

The third talk was Entity Framework Core 1.0, and covered EF and how to use it, how to use code first and also mentioned EF6 how its improved greatly from previous versions and why you should choose this version at the moment whilst EF Core 1.0 is still being worked on and has the tooling added to it for the Core 1.0 release.

The fourth talk was APIs: the cogs behind the machine and this talk was about api’s and mainly web api and how in Core 1.0 there is no MVC and WebAPI its just one thing now and your controller is an API controller, so no need for MVC and WebAPI there is just the controllers now which kind of merge both together.

The fifth talk was Dev Ops in Azure and this covered deploying your website to Azure, making changes, showing the changes, getting the publisher file for using in side Visual Studio and publishing your changes from Visual Studio using Git int his example to deploy your changes from within VS up to the new Azure portal.

The sixth talk was Hitchhikers Guide to JavaScript, this talk focused on ECMAScript and the future of JavaScript and basically how a lot more code that we write will be JavaScript and we saw examples of the features coming in the next few years etc.

The seventh talk was Web Performance and how to check your websites performance using tools like YSlow and Google Page Speed etc and then how to go about making it make far less requests, cache JavaScript, enable IIS features and how to optimise images etc to make your website perform much faster that it currently does.

The eight talk was Single Page Applications and was about KnockoutJS and Angular, talking about Angular 2 and how it makes use of TypeScript and showed code covering KnockoutJS and AngularJS.

The ninth talk was about Hybrid Web Apps and how you can create application that can appear as Windows 8/10 tiles, make use of Microsoft Office and showed some very neat stuff using ManifoldJS which is itself very cool stuff.

Other stuff mentioned
I wrote some notes during the talks (should have taken a lot more) but a couple of things I need to look at are listed below:-

Summary
The event was great, full days learning, a lot of content covered, great speakers and good turn out. Spoke to some guys I chat to on twitter and all in all an awesome day spent learning some new stuff. There was a lot of content, I’ve missed half of it I’m sure so take a look at the slides on the site at MSWebdevday.

Dear Microsoft can we have some more of these days please? – especially Azure and Core related content.


Dec15201315 December 201315 December 20131Commentby Gregor Suttie

NDC London – Day Three

Posted in Events, Training

Miguel%20Castro
Day 3 – Knocking it out the park, with KnockoutJS by Miguel A. Castro (@miguelcastro67)
The first talk I attended on day 3 was Knocking it out the park, with KnockoutJS by Miguel A. Castro

Miguel’s talk walked you through KnockoutJS, what you would use it for and showed you several demos as he went building upon each one as he covered more and more on KnockoutJS. Miguel is a very good speaker, his talk was very well delivered and flowed excellently – his demos were useful and were very well explained.

Damian%20Edwards
Day 3 – ASP.NET SignalR 2.0 and beyond by Damien Edwards and David Fowler(@DamianEdwards)
The second talk on day 3 I attended was ASP.NET SignalR 2.0 and beyond by Damien Edwards and David Fowler

Damien Edwards and David Fowler introduced everyone to a new major version of SignalR and what has been added/updated.
There is tighter integration with OWIN, .NET 4.5 server dependency, full support for self-hosting, new clients, massively improved cross-domain/CORS support, API usability improvements, easier hub unit testing and better error handling. We’ll cover all this and give a sneak peak and new features in upcoming releases in this information packed session. Very informative talk which I enjoyed.

Mads%20Torgersen%20324
Day 3 – The future of C# by Mads Torgersen (blogs.msdn.com/b/madst/)
The third talk I attended on Day 3 was The future of C# by Mads Torgersen

Mads talked about how the past several years, the Microsoft C# team has been focused on rebuilding the compilers and editing experiences as part of Project Roslyn. He also introduced us to potential new language features are on the designers’ minds. Features discussed included read only auto properties, multiple return values, null checking, structural typing is ‘on the radar’.

Jessica%20Kerr3%20256
Day 3 – Object Oriented Design in the Wild by Jessica Kerr (@jessitron)
The fourth talk I attended on Day 3 was Object Oriented Design in the Wild by Jessica Kerr

Jessica talked about the reasoning behind object-oriented design principles, and how we find their application in the wider world. This session will challenge you to go beyond rules and standards and ask, when is clean code worth your time? Go beyond OO and come back with new insight. Interesting talk all about OO in different languages.

David%20Fowler1%20324
Day 3 – ASP.NET SignalR 2.0 and beyond by Damien Edwards and David Fowler(@davidfowl)
The fifth talk on day 3 I attended was Using ASP.NET SignalR in Anger by Damien Edwards and David Fowler

Damien Edwards and David Fowler What showed off the best patterns for using SignalR in a real application – both guys walked through code samples of how to go about doing such a thing and discussed a number of topics including when best to use SignalR as opposed to other technologies.


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Dec15201315 December 201315 December 20130Commentby Gregor Suttie

NDC London 2013 – Day Two

Posted in Events, Training

Scott%20Guthrie%20London
Day 2 – Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part I and II by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu)
The first and second talks I attended on day 2 were Build Real World Cloud Apps using Windows Azure Part I and II by Scott Guthrie

Scott gave a two part covering the following:-

•Automating Everything
•Source Control Best Practices
•Continuous Integration/Delivery
•Enterprise Identity and SSO Integration
•Web Development Best Practices
•Data Storage Options
•Data Storage Partitioning Approaches
•Using unstructured Blob storage
•Designing to survive failures
•Monitoring and Diagnostics
•Transient Fault Handling
•Distributed Caching
•Using the Queue Centric Work Pattern

Was a really great insight into the capabilities of Azure and how as developers we can use these features for building applications right now.

Jeremy%20D%20Miller
Day 2 – Automating Testing in the big, bad Enterprise World by Jeremy D. Miller (@jeremydmiller)
The third talk on day 2 I attended was Automating Testing in the big, bad Enterprise World by Jeremy D. Miller

Jeremy discussed how his team has a strategy for faster and more productive manual testing and troubleshooting when using RavenDB and just how easy it is to use RavenDB for in memory creation and deletion of the entire database for unit testing purposes. He talked about how automated testing efforts frequently fail because the tests are too time-consuming to author, too brittle when the underlying application changes and showed examples of how he tried to make this process easier.

Robert%20C%20Martin
Day 2 – Functional Programming: What? Why? When? by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) (@unclebobmartin)
The fourth talk I attended on Day 2 was Functional Programming: What? Why? When? by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)

Uncle Bob talked about a number of things from the past to the future and was as always very entertaining but also thought provoking – this guys a legend and listening to him talking was a pleasure.

Burke%20Holland%20324
Day 2 – AngularJS Directives And The Computer Science Of JavaScript by Burke Holland (@burkeholland)
The fifth talk I attended on Day 2 was AngularJS Directives And The Computer Science Of JavaScript by Burke Holland

Burke gave us a run through of Directives in AngularJS, what they are and how they work showing code samples.

TimGThomas%20324
Day 2 – Test Your Javascript…with the Help of D&D by Tim G. Thomas (@timgthomas)
The fifth talk I attended on Day 2 was Test Your Javascript…with the Help of D&D by Tim G. Thomas

Tim talked about how testing JavaScript—the modern Web’s ubiquitous development language—can be a daunting task. In his session he introduced us to some methods to do just that…but with a Dungeons and Dragons twist.


Dec15201315 December 201315 December 20130Commentby Gregor Suttie

NDC London 2013 – Day 1

Posted in Events, Training

Dan%20NorthKeyNote with Dan North – JackStones: the Journey to Mastery (@tastapod)

Dan’s talk was about how you go about becoming a Master at something and was very insightful, Dan talked about a lot of cool stuff and talked about learning how you learn to become at whatever it is your trying to master.

Dan described some of the many facets of craftsmanship and talks about trying to figure out exactly what the craft is that we programmers do.

Venkat%20SubramaniamDay 1 – Cleaning up Code Smell by Venkat Subramaniam (@venkat_s)
The first talk I attended was Cleaning Up Code Smell by Venkat Subramaniam – his talk was covering ways to identify code smell, how to clean them up. We will also discuss proactive ways to avoid smells in the first place.

Venkat is a superb speaker and covered a lot within 1 hour, his talk was well delivered and he cracked a few good jokes along the way, very entertaining talk.

Mark%20Rendle%20324Day 1 – Simple.Web 101 by Mark Rendle (@markrendle)
The second talk I attended was Simple.Web 101 by Mark Rendle – his talk was covering his .NET/Mono web framework Simple.Web.

Simple.Web applies the SOLID design principles to web application development, and makes building web applications an experience of the deepest joy. Simple.Web makes keeping your code clean, and building real REST/HATEOAS APIs.

Mark talked about why he wrote Simple.Web, showed us some of the code and then showed off some examples of how to use Simple.Web in an application

Scott%20Guthrie%20London
Day 1 – Introduction to Windows Azure Part I and II by Scott Guthrie (@scottgu)
The third and fourth talks I attended was Introduction to Windows Azure Part I by Scott Guthrie

Scott gave a two part talk which provided an overview of Windows Azure – including a number of demos, and how you can take advantage of it to build great applications in the cloud. His talk was a superb introduction to what Azure is and how you can leverage Windows Azure to build great applications. As always his talks were very informative, every question was given a detailed answer and was a really great way to learn about what Azure can do.

Michele%20Bustamante%20324
Day 1 – Windows Azure Essentials by Michele Leroux Bustamante (@michelebusta)
The fifth talk I attended was Windows Azure Essentials by Michele Leroux Bustamante

Michele’s session was aimed at getting you up to speed on the essential features developers should be aware of, and how to apply them in practical scenarios on all aspects of Windows Azure.

Michele showed off the differences between web sites and cloud services, as well as other practical tips for building Azure apps such as storing content, sending email, working with queues and choosing the right technology, and collecting important metrics for visibility into application health.

Dan%20North
Day 1 – Why Agile doesn’t scale – and what you can do about it by Dan North (@tastapod)
The sixth and final talk I attended was Why Agile doesn’t scale – and what you can do about it by Dan North

Dan talked about shared guiding principles, a clear vision and a common understanding enable what he called contextual consistency. He also talked about delivery assurance, governance and portfolio management in the enterprise.

Was a very interesting talk and a nice end to the day.


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