Microsoft MVP Connection 2017 in Hyderabad

For the last two days, I was attending in Hyderabad  – Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Connect 2017 event. As a Microsoft Regional Director (honorary title) I was invited to speak in the two days program – which was a get-together of all MVP’s in India. I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with the MVPs and Microsofties – the energy in the room was palpable. Most of the MVPs were excited with the new features that have come in Xamarin developer tools and the Azure platform.

Laurent Bugnion from Microsoft demoed an end to end scenario of using various Azure tools, including Azure functions and Azure Mobile Center which showed on how to read bitcoin value every hour and plot a rich trend graph – then deliver it as a native mobile app for Android and iOS. He talked about his role along with other Cloud Developer Advocates that are spread around the world helping developers using Azure. Be sure to follow their twitter handle @azureadvocates.

The next session was presented by VSTS (Developer tools) team from Microsoft IDC on how their team of over 6000+ developers moved from a waterfall model to devops and their learnings in the process.

• One of the books that initiated the thought process was “Drive” by Daniel H.Pink – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. 
• Each sprint is about 3 weeks, this duration just felt right; 3 sprints make a Plan; 6 months makes a Season; 18 months planning makes an Epic. Leadership is responsible for Seasons and Epics; with each team having autonomy over Plans and Sprints.

You can watch this talk in YouTube – “Moving 70,000 Microsofties to DevOps on the Public Cloud” and read more on “DevOps at Microsoft”.

We also got to see a demo and explanation on Microsoft’s Kaizala, a mobile app that makes it easy to connect and coordinate with your task workers.