Empowering Australian Developers to do more with Azure

The first IT job I had was training mature age students at college how to use PCs. While I was doing this I also wrote and delivered a course on how to build sites for the (new at the time) World Wide Web.

My work on the WWW course got me noticed by a business in London that was building websites for their customers. After joining them, one of the largest projects I worked on was the first website for Marks & Spencer which we developed using Active Server Pages (ASP) and hosted on Windows NT 4. We even ran a celebrity text chat session for M&S using Exchange 5.5's chat service!

Clearly there have been a few years (my son: "yeah, like 10 billion years") between the above and today, and I've done a lot of things in the interim: development, operations, delivery management and community organisation. But at my core I've always been a developer.

If you've read this far I am sure you've figured out that today I'm not solving a technical problem for you. 🙂

So why am I reminiscing about times past? Well, really, I'm just calling back to where I started my career: helping people do more with technology, and particularly with new or unfamiliar technology.

Which leads me to the reason for this blog post.

I'm super excited to let everyone know that from August 2018 I'll be joining Microsoft here in Australia as the Azure Pro Developer Lead, giving me the opportunity to return to my roots. I will be supporting developers in building their solutions on Azure using the platform's wide range of innovative features, helping them move beyond Virtual Machines!

Azure enables rapid realisation of ideas you have and I want Australian developers to be empowered to deliver their ideas using Azure as their accelerator. I'm looking forward to starting and will see you at an event, at your office or over a coffee.

Happy Days 😎

Azure and Bit artwork from the talented Ashley McNamara. Thanks Ashley!

I also recently saw the below tweet which resonated with me around why I think Microsoft Azure is the best place for developers.