We’re only half way through January and this year is already busy. I am really excited to be speaking at SQLBits this year!
SQLBits is a conference that various members of the Black Marble team attend regularly and rave about. It’s the event if you want to gain knowledge and insight into all aspects of databases and data management, reporting, BI and more. Microsoft are a platinum sponsor of the event this year and a whole heap of big names are flying in to present.
It’s January, which can only mean one thing. It’s time for the annual Black Marble Tech Update. If you’re an IT or development manager, come along to hear the stuff you need to know about Microsoft’s releases and updates last year and what we know so far about what is coming this year.
Tech Updates are hard work to prepare for, but they’re quite exhilarating to present. In the morning, myself, Andy and Andrew will run through the key moves and changes in the Microsoft ecosystem to help IT managers with their strategic planning: What’s coming out of support, what’s got a new release due; in short, what do you need to pay attention to for your organisation’s IT.
I’ve posted before about helping out at the IT Camps run by the Microsoft DX team. I’m a fervent supporter of them – they are hands-on days of technical content run by great people who know their stuff and, importantly, they are run around the country.
Next week will see me in Manchester with Ed Baker for the latest instalment. The current series of campus are two days with the first being around Mobile Device Management and the second around extending your datacentre into Azure. I’ll be there for day two to be Ed’s wingman as we take attendees through hands-on labs around virtual machines and talk about virtual networks, Azure Active directory and pretty much anything else Azure-related we get asked about.
I am now going to speaking on the DevOps track at Future Decoded. I’ll be channelling Richard to talk about how our dev-release pipeline is constructed at Black Marble and how the various Microsoft tools that we use could be swapped out for alternatives in a heterogeneous environment.
Whilst this isn’t an area that I usually speak around, it’s something that I am very involved in as Richard and I constantly look to improve our internal practices around development, test and deployment. Big thanks to Susan Smith for inviting me to participate.
It’s a busy week. I’m speaking at the [Black Marble-hosted GWAB2 event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event= Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2) this Saturday, along with Steve Spencer and Andy Westgarth. Richard and Robert will also be on hand which means between us we should be able to cover questions on much of the newly re-monikered Microsoft Azure.
I’ll be running through IaaS, Azure AD and looking at hybrid cloud solutions from an IT perspective while Steve and Andy talk through the other platform services from a developer point of view.
