Got selected to the Microsoft Certifications Advisory Council

Tiago Costa / / Certification

Last Friday I got an email from Microsoft Learning (or WWL – Worldwide Learning has they are called now) welcoming me to the Microsoft Certifications Advisory Council. I have no words! Literally!!! This is a super-limited to around 30 persons from the community that have been chosen across MCTs and MVPs. I have been working in the technical training industry for more than 15 years, helping thousands of students to get certified and in the last years with a focus on Azure. I have tons of feedback to provide to Microsoft!

It’s an honor to be able to provide feedback directly from the field and help Microsoft FTEs (Full time employees). I will not make any decisions, but I can help then with data then it would be easier to make awesome decisions for the market! If you have feedback about Microsoft Certifications, I’m ready and eager to hear what you have to say. Reach out to me and I promised your feedback will be sent over to Microsoft!

Super excited! Let the game begin!!!

 

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/