Its Day 73 of my 100 Days of Cloud journey, and today its a quick post about the importance of attending and being a member of Azure and Cloud User Groups.
User Groups are a great way meet new people and network in the community, but also to learn new skills from guest speakers who are experts.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve attended some excellent User Group sessions with some awesome people in the Cloud Community, such as:
- Limerick DotNet-Azure User Group – hosted by Karl Cooke, we had an excellent session from Sarah Lean on the power of Octopus Deploy.
- Microsoft Cloud Security User Group – hosted by Chris Wright and Charlie Gough, we had talks from Kevin Evans on Securing your Cloud Environment, and Derek Smith on Modernising your SOC with Azure Sentinel.
- Bradford Cloud User Group – hosted by Shabaz Darr and Imran Rashid, we had 4 excellent lightning talks from the following awesome ladies:
- May Alhajri (aka Agent 008) spoke about her journey from Microsoft MVP to Microsoft employee.
- Sarah Lean gave a lightning talk on Windows Package Manager.
- Hiraa Amir gave a talk about her motivation and journey to found Brave New Woman.
- Shannon Kuehn is Identity and Access PM at Microsoft and gave a talk on workload identities and federation which is a new recent feature!
- Welsh Azure User Group – hosted by John Lunn aka JonnyChipz, we had talks from Elkhan Yusubov on Azure Bicep, and Matthew Fortunka on building apps with Blazor and SignalR.
All of these User Groups and many more can be found on meetup.com, and you can also follow all of the speakers above on both Twitter (links above) or search for them on LinkedIn. Also, most of the sessions from these User Groups are available on their YouTube Channels a few days after the events.
So log on to meetup and search for a User Group or Community near you, or you can attend these awesome ones above while they are still hosted as online events!
Hope you enjoyed this post, until next time!
Michael Durkan 