Talk Ideas for 2020

After a 12-month break from developer conferences, I'm looking forward to working with a small handful of conferences next year. I've been kicking around some ideas for topics I’d like to talk about, and I'm sharing those ideas because thoughts and feedback are always appreciated!

An Architects Guide to Building Cloud Native Solutions in Azure

One of the challenges you’ll face when building applications in the cloud is in choosing the best technologies for your solution. In this session we’ll take a broad look at the technologies, services, and infrastructure available in Azure while drilling into the vital details you need to make decisions. What’s the best host for my container-based solution? Should I place my data into a data lake, a data warehouse, or a simple blob container? What’s the essential difference between a message queue and an event hub? We’ll answer these questions while also covering topics like security, identity, governance and compliance.

Apache Spark for .NET Developers

Big data meets .NET with Apache Spark, the analytics engine for large-scale data processing. If you are a .NET developer and you need to create an ETL process for high volumes of data, or process large streams of data in real time, or train machine learning models against a big data set, or explore big data sets with exploratory queries, then Apache Spark is a technology you should know about. Once we’ve seen how to setup an Apache Spark cluster and worked with the shell, we’ll dive into the .NET bindings for Spark and see how to query and analyze data using C#, F#, and SQL. We’ll also be looking at Azure’s DataBricks platform to work with Spark in a managed environment.

What .NET Core Developers Should Know about MSBuild

If you’ve ever wondered what makes MSBuild work, or if you’ve ever needed to tweak the XML in a project file to allow your software to compile, then this session is for you. We’ll start by learning about the fundamental concepts in MSBuild, concepts like tasks, properties, and conditionals. We’ll then move into the details of build targets that drive most of today’s builds. This talk is based on years of experience in being the person who everyone uses to debug builds, so there will be no shortage of tips and tricks for managing and debugging your builds.

Five Lessons Learned as the CTO

Leadership skills come naturally for some people, but for the rest of us we need to figure out leadership as we go along. If you are thinking of making the jump from being a technical contributor, or have your sights set for the chief technical position, this session will give you some insight and lessons learned from experiences on the job.