It’s hard to believe it’s already 2017! It’s time for another agile focused lunch and learn and this time, we are focusing on better testing with Microsoft Azure Resource Management Templates. Please do join us if you can, and feel free to forward the invite to any colleagues that you think would be interested as well. Hope to see you next month!

Lunch and Learn Details:

Often times developers find themselves working on multiple areas of an application during any one release cycle. This includes features, bugs, and spikes that often require isolation of both code and data. Until now, developers were constricted by the ability to quickly provision resources and isolate testing of a particular feature or bug in a single environment. Environments are usually shared, and this limitation leads to many other challenges when developing in a shared environment.

Using Azure Resource Management Templates, we can quickly provision identical environments with our favorite ALM tools, and gather valuable feedback and quality test results. This valuable data can help us to introduce features to the market more effectively from all aspects of the application lifecycle.

Please join our Agile experts for this free lunch and learn to hear more about how you can transform your company into a high-performance customer-pleasing engine.

Complimentary lunch will be provided to registered attendees.

Seating is limited. Register now to secure your spot!

Event Info

February 1^st, 2017, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM CDT

Microsoft Office – Downers Grove

3025 Highland Pkwy Suite #200

Downers Grove, IL 60515

Presenter:

Chris Taylor is a Senior Consultant at Polaris Solutions, a small IT consulting firm based out of Chicago and St. Louis. He wrote his first line of code at age 11 and has had a passion to continually learn how to make better software by having better communication through proper tooling. He has worked in a number of roles including development, DevOps, QA, architecture, and even as a development manager. Outside of his daily life of all things software related, he entertains himself with watching 'B' movies, spending time with his family, and is a competitive martial artist and instructor.

Polaris Solutions, LLC

Polaris Solutions is an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) consulting firm. We specialize in helping teams deliver high value software through technical leadership, process improvement, and software development expertise.

PolarisSolutions.com

info@polarissolutions.com

Lately I have been hearing this a lot, both as a general statement and more often than not, as a lament. However you define ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) and DevOps (definition hotly being debated in board rooms everywhere), and lord knows there are 82 ways to define each of those terms, they have a common thread – people. And people are messy. We are emotional, unpredictable, and our motivations are not always obvious. So of course consulting in any area that heavily involves interactions with people - like ALM and DevOps - will also be messy. I don’t mean that as a criticism, it’s just a fact. I also don’t just mean working with OTHER people is messy, working with *me* is messy. Some days, I am a tired, hormonal, hot damn mess, and that’s OK. You probably are too once in a while. As long as we all agree to help each other out on those hopefully rare bad days…and yes I am in fact advocating that even in IT we have to get our hands dirty and support our coworkers in ways that don’t involve pull requests or PowerShell.

So where am I going with this? Well, a lot of places eventually, my hope is to start a series of blog posts where I veer from my technically focused topics to even harder stuff – people stuff. And I make no promises on consistency of how often I release those posts, or how many I’ll be writing. Something I struggle with is fear of disappointing people, and as a serial over-committer I’m starting this series off by NOT over-committing. Look, progress, already!

Not sure where I’ll go first, but likely I’ll start with something <sarcasm> light and fun </sarcasm> around failure and vulnerability. I’ve actually blogged about both of those topics before, but it’s been a while, and I’ve learned a lot since then. Mostly about myself, but in a lot of cases I can apply some of those learnings to others as well. I’ve also been working with a really great life/career coach for about 15 months now, and I’ll share some of that experience here as well. Approaching terrifying vulnerability territory there, but like my friend Ben says, a great way to really hone your coaching skills is to see a therapist!

If you have requests, let me know! I cannot guarantee I’ll be able to address every topic with absolute clarity and wisdom, but I’ll do my best to at least share my experiences and ideas. Talk to you again soon.

Just found out about a great event coming to Chicago next week, which lasts two full days and will be held at McCormick Place. If you’re not local, be sure to check out their schedule as they are hitting a number of other cities in the US and across the globe!

This is a free, two-day technical training for IT professionals and developers delivered by the experts who build the cloud services across Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Windows 10. There are 70+ technical sessions, you’ll get a chance to pick the brains of Microsoft engineers, and there are even hands-on-labs available on-site, so lots of opportunities to get your hands dirty at this one! Alas, I will not be able to attend this event, but hopefully you can. Get registered today to secure your spot!

More details below…

Keynote

Hear how Microsoft’s enterprise solutions can help you be more successful, more productive and add value to your IT organization in today’s digital transformation landscape. In Chicago, the Keynote is being given by Jason Zander, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure, Cloud + Enterprise!

Sessions

Over 70 technical training sessions covering a range of topics across Microsoft Azure and the hybrid platform including security, networking, data, storage, identity, mobile, cloud infrastructure, management, DevOps, app platform, productivity, collaboration and more.

Ask the experts

Access hundreds of Microsoft engineers and tech leaders ready to help you tackle your toughest dilemmas—they’re up for the challenge.

Hands-on labs

Go beyond the sessions, take a test drive of the latest technology with cloud services across Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and Windows 10.

The agenda is far too robust to put in a blog post but here is the high level snapshot of what you can expect:

A FAR more detailed agenda can be found on the event website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/techsummit/chicago.aspx