DotnetFriday - December 2023 Edition

The latest edition of DotnetFriday proved to yet-again a great success, with attendees benefiting from insightful sessions delivered by industry experts. Erwin Staal and Patrick de Kruijf took the stage to delve into the intricacies of Azure Policy, offering a comprehensive exploration of its applications and best practices. Their session not only elucidated the technical nuances but also showcased the practical implementation of Azure Policy in real-world scenarios. On another front, Henry Been captivated the audience with his session on project management titled ‘The Art of getting shit done.’ His engaging presentation not only provided valuable insights into effective project management strategies but also infused a sense of humor and practicality into the often challenging realm of getting projects across the finish line. The dynamic combination of technical depth and project management finesse made this DotnetFriday meetup an enriching experience for all attendees, fostering a vibrant community of learning and collaboration.

Erwin Staal & Patrick de Kruijf

Erwin Staal

Erwin Staal is an Azure Architect and DevOps consultant working for Xpirit in the Netherlands. Helping companies deliver their software to customers using DevOps practices and cloud-native architectures is what he loves to do. He believes in the power of both the monolith and microservices and prefers to run his workload on the Azure Cloud and/or Kubernetes. Besides the work he does for the customers of Xpirit, he has a passion for sharing knowledge. He is one of the authors of ‘Azure Infrastructure as Code’ (https://www.manning.com/books/azure-infrastructure-as-code), occasionally writes a blog, and is an international speaker at conferences.

Patrick de Kruijf

Patrick is a passionate consultant with broad knowledge of infrastructure and security aspects of IT. As a Cloud Architect and Specialist, he helps customers by designing, implementing, and assessing cloud architectures and solutions in alignment with his customers’ business and IT objectives.

He applies state-of-the-art technologies and concepts, including the cloud and DevOps, to help his customers create business value. His approach is one of honesty and building relationships, which always makes him a trusted advisor for his stakeholders. Patrick has a clear and analytical mindset and is a consultant with excellent communication and presentation skills.

Throughout the past 16 years, Patrick has accumulated a broad experience in Infrastructure, Security, and Consulting, mainly at companies that relied heavily on Microsoft technology. He has worked in various disciplines, from enterprise to government, non-profit, and private customers. As consultant and architect, Patrick was responsible for designing and implementing Microsoft reference architecture, principles, and guidelines.

Session: Govern your Azure environment through Azure Policy

When your Azure environment is relatively small, it is straightforward to keep track of what resources you have running in Azure and make sure that your solution is secure, compliant, and cost-effective. When your cloud workload gets bigger, and you have a lot of subscriptions and multiple management groups, that is much harder to do. Luckily, Azure has a built-in feature called Azure Policy that can help you govern your Azure resources. But how do we implement policies, guarantee compliance and security, without decreasing developer agility? This session will teach you how to deploy policies using Infrastructure as Code. You will see how to use the built-in policies and how to create your own. We will look at all the different effects that a policy can have and which should be used when. You will learn how to assign policies on different scopes and finally how to review the compliance status. All with the goal to enforce security, be compliant, monitor that continuously, and keep costs at bay.

Henry Been

Henry Been is an independent architect and developer from The Netherlands. He enjoys working with software development teams to create and deliver great software for the Azure cloud. His interests include the Azure cloud, Agile, DevOps, software architecture and the design and implementation of testable and maintainable software.

Besides his work he is a conference speaker at international conferences, is the author of two books, and creates online training courses for Pluralsight and A Cloud Guru. For his work in the community he has been awarded the Microsoft MVP Award since 2019. To follow Henry you can go to his blog or look him up on Twitter: @henry_been

Session: The art of getting 💩 done

Do you want to call in sick for the half day of Sprint Planning every other week? Do you take every excuse to cancel your pre-refinement meeting with your product owner and simply want to stand up and leave the actual refinement after debating the sizing of a story for 20 minutes? Do you just feel that all that sprinting is just not working for you?

If that’s the case, this session is for you! Over the last few years, we have seen an explosion in methodologies, frameworks and ways of working within IT. But is this helping us in getting more sh*t done? Sometimes, but not always. Whenever given the opportunity and the right context, I try do things differently. In this session I will share what I dislike about some of the things happening in our industry, and how I have approached things in three different teams over the last few years.

So please join Henry Been in this session where he reflects on ten years of working in software development and the things that have helped him getting 💩 done.