MVP Award 2020-2021

Tiago Costa / / Random words

Just got the message!

I got renewed as a Microsoft Azure MVP. That’s 5 years in a row! It’s indescribable the felling and honor to be among the elite of Microsoft Azure Professionals. My imposter syndrome comes to life when I get these emails. Still can’t believe that Microsoft recognizes me toghether with so many great professional out there.

I would like to thank for all the support that I got from several community members and specialy from my family that puts up with my absences when I choose to speak at events across the world, all the late conference calls with other events organizers, etc… Without this support all this wasn’t possible. My wife Sofia and my daughter are amazing and I’m very lucky to share my life with then!

A lot of people ask me what the Microsoft MVP program is, so here it goes: Microsoft MVP it’s a recognition from Microsoft for all the non-paid activity I do for the community. I share my knowledge on Microsoft Azure in conferences, online forums, videos, blog posts, … I also help organizing events for the Azure User Group Portugal – https://www.meetup.com/Azure-User-Group-Portugal/ and the local conference Global Azure – https://www.globalazure.pt/ – and SPS Lisbon, now Collabdays Lisbon – https://www.collabdays.org/2020-lisbon/. You can find more information about the MVP program at https://mvp.microsoft.com/ and a list of all the MVPs at https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/MvpSearch.

 

Plans for next year?

Oh yes!!! I have great plans lineup for this MVP year: Continuing to speak in amazing events across the world. In the next few months online-only, but Covid-19 will not stop me from sharing my knowledge and helping the cloud community, so in a nutshell:

  • Keep speaking at conferences and user groups.
  • Growing the Azure User Group Portugal – https://www.meetup.com/Azure-User-Group-Portugal/
  • Keep teaching Azure to IT professionals, Developers and Architects
  • Helping amazing customer in moving to the cloud by building and designing state of the art solutions
  • Writing and producing amazing content, both in this site and on other platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, …
  • Publishing tons of videos on my YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/c/tiagocostamct
  • and some more to TBA activities. Keep your eyes on this space.

A final thank you, to all the professionals that I have shared my space with. It’s been an honor and I hope to share more amazing conversations with all of you! Come and join me on my next engagements.

Microsoft European Virtual Open Source Summit – 16 July

Tiago Costa / / Azure, Events

 

The Microsoft European Virtual Open Source Summit is coming in a few days. If you haven’t registered yet now is your chance!!!

Make sure you don’t miss this unique digital event, designed to celebrate communities, entrepreneurs and developers coming together to build the future of open source technologies in the cloud.

The event will consist into 4 parallel tracks: Azure Infra & Ops, Innovation, Data & AI, and Developer.

This year event will have amazing Speakers. I would like to highlight:

  • Erica Brescia, COO at GitHub
  • Scott Hanselman, Partner Program Manager at Microsoft
  • Thomas Maurer, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft
  • Brendan Burns, CVP AZURE COMPUTE OSS CLOUD at Microsoft
  • Abel Wang, Principal Cloud Advocate and DevOps Lead at Microsoft

 

Block your agenda NOW. I will not miss this opportunity and will be watching! Join me and have fun day learning new technologies.

Each track will be packed with expert guest speakers who’ll be deep diving into a wide variety of topics, from chaos engineering and serverless architecture to multicloud app development.

You can check the full agenda at: https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/techwiese/events/microsoft-european-virtual-open-source-summit.aspx

“See you” there?

Azure AI and Azure Data Fundamentals Certifications (NEW)

Tiago Costa / / Azure, Certification

Microsoft announced two more Azure Fundamentals certification:

  • Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals

Here are some specific details about the new certifications:

Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals

Exam – AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (beta)

Candidates for this exam should have foundational knowledge of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) concepts and related Microsoft Azure services. This exam is an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge of common ML and AI workloads and how to implement them on Azure. This exam is intended for candidates with both technical and non-technical backgrounds. Data science and software engineering experience are not required; however, some general programming knowledge or experience would be beneficial.

Skills measured

  • Describe AI workloads and considerations
  • Describe fundamental principles of machine learning on Azure
  • Describe features of computer vision workloads on Azure
  • Describe features of conversational AI workloads on Azure

Full list at: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4wAEF

Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals

Exam – DP-900: Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals

Candidates for this exam should have foundational knowledge of core data concepts and how they are implemented using Microsoft Azure data services. This exam is intended for candidates beginning to work with data in the cloud. Candidates should be familiar with the concepts of relational and non-relational data, and different types of data workloads such as transactional or analytical.

Skills measured

  • Describe core data concepts
  • Describe how to work with relational data on Azure
  • Describe how to work with non-relational data on Azure
  • Describe an analytics workload on Azure

Full list at: https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4wqeZ

I will create study plans for these two exams and publish then in this website. I also plan to create 2 more playlists to my YouTube channel and create content for these two certifications. You can find my Channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvP41PZ3zM4aV8Zqey5yz7w. Subscribe to my Channel today and get notified when I launch the videos.

These certifications should be available on or around June 8, 2020. I already got some space in my schedule to take this! Always excited to add two more badges to my Microsoft Transcript!

What about you? Are you going to prepare and take the challenge?

One Week – Speaking in 3 different continents!

Tiago Costa / / Events, Speaking

COVID-19 aside and this has been amazing times! I’m doing all my work remotely, customers are happy and see no difference, but I have to confess that I kind of miss the airport life. I very fortunately to work in the IT industry and even more working on Microsoft Azure that allows me to do amazing work remotely and deliver my classes via Teams or even using Webex like this week… That is the bad part of this week, I really don’t like webex (yes I have used lower case…). That interface seems from the 90”…. Let’s get back to the topic here.

This past week I had the amazing opportunity to speak to 3 different countries each one in a different continent:

  • Nigeria, Africa
  • Germany, Europe
  • Bangladesh, Asia

Remote allows us to do this kind of deliveries and impact people lives. I couldn’t have done something like this with in-person events, just too expensive to travel to all this places and more 1 week of work that I could do. This is why I started this article writing that this pandemic has been teaching us some important lessons. We can do more than what we were doing in the past. I also love the feedback that I’m getting from attendees saying that these events are super inclusive because you just need an Internet connection and you get access to the content. Like always I loved to interact with different persons from different cultures. It’s always amazing to understand how the world works across the globe! #WeCanDoMore

Here is some links and information about the sessions I delivered.

Learn Azure By Moonlight at Microsoft Teams – https://rdre.me/AzureMoonlightSeries

Nigeria – May 3, 2020 – 6:30 PM (GMT +1)
Session 1: Azure Web Apps

Azure Cologne Meetup at Virtual – https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cologne-Meetup/events/269934650/

Virtual – May 7, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM GMT+2
Session : Top 10 features of Azure Web Apps!

Bangladesh IT Community at Virtual – https://www.facebook.com/604241342952709/videos/926751294437116/
Virtual – May 8, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+2
Discussion about – Global Software Engineering Jobs after COVID-19 and Microsoft Azure.

Happy to speak more to other countries that want an awesome session about Azure! If you run a usergroup/community and your audience wants to know more about Azure, just ping me and I’m happy to accommodate you in my busy schedule.

You can keep up with all my speaking engagements at https://www.tiagocosta.com/speaking/

May Madness for online conferences – An opportunity to do better?

Tiago Costa / / Events, Speaking

Corona virus outbreak has changed the conference space forever. Some amazing conferences have been canceled, postpone, or converted into online only. This last model – online – it’s not by far my favorite. I love to interact with the attendees and other speakers at the conference I speak. Nevertheless, this new format has given me the opportunity to increase the number of conferences and usergroups I’m speaking. Along the years I have been getting way more invitations to speak than I can accommodate in my schedule. Or is because I need to be in another continent the next day or just because I want to be at home with the family that day, etc… Now I just need to login into Teams, Skype, or whatever tool the organizers are using and deliver from my home office.

In the next few days, I will deliver 2 sessions in user groups without leaving my office. One for Nigeria and another to a Germany user group based in Cologne! You can get all the information here:

Learn Azure By Moonlight at Online
Nigeria – May 3, 2020 – 6:30 PM (GMT +1)
Session 1: Azure Web Apps
Link: https://rdre.me/AzureMoonlightSeries

Azure Cologne Meetup at Online
Cologne, Germany – May 7, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM GMT+2
Session: Top 10 features of Azure Web Apps!
Link: https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cologne-Meetup/events/269934650/

But the May madness is not just about these small gatherings, also 3 big names in the Cloud industry are organizing massive online conferences. Microsoft, GitHub and Docker will deliver a total of 5 free days full of content and mostly delivered by their Product Groups and close customers. This is an amazing opportunity for you to take. Specialy if it’s hard for you to attend this events in-person. Just the other day I was chatting online with, let’s call him Mr. T for privacy reasons. Usually Mr. T can’t go to this kind of events due to his medical condition. COVID-19 is forcing these events to be converted to virtual and allowing Mr. T and others like him having access to this kind of content. I just wanted to leave this here has a taught that maybe we can do better when in-person events are back. We need to be inclusive and allow then to have access, they already struggle with their condition; others are just because they simply can’t afford traveling and attending. Knowledge should not have a price tag. #WeCanDoBetter

I just leave here the list with all the information of the 3 big conferences.

GitHub Satellite – May 6 – 9:00 AM (GMT-7)


GitHub Satellite is a free virtual event featuring developers working together on the world’s software, announcements from the GitHub team, and inspiring performances by artists who code. The event is free and there are some payed workshops that cost only 50 USD and 100% of your purchase goes to organizations leading COVID-19 response efforts. You get to donate some money and learn. Sounds like an awesome plan!

You can watch last year keynote here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGC2rwOiaWc

More information / registration: https://githubsatellite.com/

Microsoft Build – May 18-19 – 09:00 AM (GMT-7)

Build is the major developer conference from Microsoft. The conference moto is “For developers by developers”. Based on previous years you should expect a lot of awesome content from the Product Groups and a lot of focus on Azure and Microsoft 365. This year Build moved to a virtual format and it’s totally FREE! You just need to register. As developers come together to help the world solve new challenges—sharing knowledge and staying connected is more important than ever. Join the Build community to learn, connect, and code—to expand your skillset today, and innovate for tomorrow.

More information / registration: https://mybuild.microsoft.com/

You can also check the some sessions from Build 2019 for free at: https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/microsoft-build-2019-sessions/

DockerCon Live 2020 – May 28 – 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (GMT-7)


DockerCom is going online via theCUBE! It’s a 1-day conference that’s free and completely online. You’ll hear from speakers in live interviews with theCUBE, hang out with Docker experts in the live hallway track, and watch recorded sessions while chatting live with the speakers. If you want to know more about running applications in Containers, this is a must to attend conference.

More information / registration: https://docker.events.cube365.net/docker/dockercon

So, there you go, some of the major names in the Cloud industry will provide amazing content for free and without you leave your home you can expand your knowledge. What are you waiting for, register today, stay safe and Learn!