DDD Sydney 2018 - Super sold-out Saturday!

Microsoft has always been a company by, of, and for developers, and the renewed Microsoft commitment to meet the Australian developer community wherever they are continued this past weekend when we were at DDD Sydney.

DDD Sydney, like Perth before it, didn't disappoint in its slick organisation and community-selected content. The unique spice to the Sydney event though was the dedicated junior developer track - a concept to be loudly applauded and, I hope, replicated elsewhere over time.

As this was my home city event I asked my oldest son if he'd like to be a paid attendee for the day - something he quickly said 'yes' to. As he's only just started high school I didn't expect him to understand all the content, but I thought it would be a good experience for him and hopefully he'd pick on some tips along the way. Well... I think he did pretty well out of the day based on the below Twitter post...

... and now I've had to install Python on his computer and order a Raspberry Pi for him! (A big thanks to Damian Brady from the Microsoft CDA team for spending the time with my son!)

Carrying on though...

At the Microsoft stand we had a great time discussing the Azure platform with developers and getting to understand how we can help them do more with it. Some of the discussions I had covered:

What's the difference between an Azure Tenant, Subscription and Region. This is a good question, and I'll post a follow-up blog post to cover this as understanding these three items are fundamental to working with Azure, particularly if you are working with many customers who each own a Subscription.
How about extending Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to do Domain Drive Design (DDD)? Good idea! VSTS has an extensibility model you can tap into if you want to add to the platform's capabilities or customise it to suit your requirements.
We had a bunch of people sign-up and play our Azure Cognitive Services-based game "Where's Bit?". We'll eventually open this up for everyone to have access to how we built the game, but for now keep an eye out for it at the upcoming events we'll be at.

Two lucky winners of "Where's Bit?" will receive invites to an upcoming Xbox triple A title launch event in Sydney in September (I can't tell you what it is.. but it's pretty damn cool.. wish I was going!)

Overall I was really happy with how the day went, and really pleased that we were able to support the organisers in their first sell-out year! Sydney developers care deeply about their personal development and being engaged with others in their community and the buzz on the day was hard to come down from once the day was over!

I'm always happy to take feedback or questions around Azure for developers - feel free to leave a comment below or to hit me up on Twitter if you have any.

We'll be back in Sydney for NDC in September and YOW! in November - hope to see you there then!

😎

Keynote with Damian Brady on AI and ML.

Closing session - excess food was donated to OzHarvest.