Betatalks the podcast

In this episode, we talk to Morten Christensen. He works at Umbraco HQ where he helps build Umbraco Cloud and the Headless cloud offering. Morten is also an Azure MVP, Azure Lover, and community addict. First, of course, we dive into Umbraco, an open source content management system based in .NET. We talk about the headless offering and the benefits for both Umbraco and its users. And we discuss a big project at Umbraco in recent years: Morten and his team needed to modernize their cloud platform. From running on virtual machines to a platform as a service. They had to rebuild everything from scratch on Azure App Service in gradually transition customers to the new platform. And in part, the goal was also to modernize their own service infrastructure, updating all their own services to the latest .NET Core and Linux-based containers. And Morten talks about the considerations and choices they made regarding infrastructure as code, for example, choosing between ARM or Terraform. Another thing we talk about is the fact that Morten does a lot for the tech community, organizing user group meetups and conferences. Furthermore, we dive a bit deeper into his love for Azure. We discuss the Azure ecosystem, the service he is most impressed with, Azure Service Bus, and the fact that Azure has become so big that it is (almost) impossible to know everything about Azure. And finally, how does Umbraco monitor their platform and respond to scaling issues or outages? Morten explains how his team uses Application Insights and what they do with the insights. And how they use the practices from Team Topologies, his favorite book, to structure their development teams.  About this episode, and Morten Christensen in particular:  you can find Morten on Twitter at @sitereactor & GitHub. You can read all his interesting blogs on his website. Find out more about the book Team Topologies here.  And, watch his talk from Cloudburst about the challenges they have been through via YouTube. About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel 

In this episode, we talk to Eduard Keilholz. He is a Cloud Solution Architect and a Microsoft Azure MVP, who focuses mainly on C# and Azure, and has a strong affinity for Angular. We talk about how to become a Microsoft MVP and the importance of intrinsic motivation to share knowledge. We discuss how people are afraid to fail, but you should never fear failure; whatever knowledge you share there is always someone for whom it is valuable. Next, we talk about a demo and polling app he uses in his talks, and how he created it using microservices and Azure Container Apps. Container Apps is a new service that sits in the middle between Container Instances on one hand and Azure Kubernetes Service on the other. Eduard explains why he believes that this service is really amazing. And we dive more into KEDA, Kubernetes, and Event-Driven Autoscaling. Furthermore, we discuss Infrastructure as Code. A topic Eduard has even written a book on. He believes that if you say you are doing DevOps but not Infrastructure as Code, you are not truly doing DevOps. We talk about the many options you have to do Infrastructure as Code. In his book, he focuses on everything concerning ARM, Azure Resource Manager, and its features, usage, and benefits. And we conclude with some advice about Bicep.About this episode, and Eduard Keilholz in particular:  you can find @ed_dotnet on Twitter & GitHub. Check out his blogs on his website. And, you can find his book: Infrastructure as code here on GitHub or order the book here.About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel 

In this episode, we talk to Femke Cornelissen, a Technical Evangelist at Wortell and co-founder and Community Manager of Dutch Women in Tech. Femke is the host of Microsoft talks on Twitter Spaces, where they discuss Microsoft solutions, and a Microsoft 365 blogger with only Dutch content. We talk about her role as Technical Evangelist, where she spreads the word about Microsoft Modern Workplace; its solutions, what’s new and everything about it. For example, Microsoft Viva, which is a productivity tool for a better employer and employee experience. We dive into the features and benefits of Viva. We talk about the Dutch Women in Tech initiative, which aims to get more women involved and interested in IT, and how they try to do that. She also explains that she hosts talks on Twitter Spaces to share knowledge, talk to different people with different perspectives, and enable discussions on specific topics. Last but not least, we talk about Microsoft Ignite and the announcements there about Microsoft 365. In particular, about Microsoft Loop and Teams Premium. About this episode, and Femke Cornelissen in particular:  you can find @Femkedebruin on Twitter & GitHub. Check out her website and read the blogs. Here you can find her community 'Dutch women in tech'. And, listen en join 'Cloud Conversations' on Twitter. About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel 

In this episode, we talk with two very special guests, Rick & Oscar themselves. We look back on a very exciting podcast year for us. And we dive into our favorite podcast moments. Rick & Oscar also share what they think were the most memorable tech developments this year. Furthermore, Rick makes a new year announcement you would not want to miss, they take a look into the future and discuss what they think is coming next year in tech. In short, this is an episode you do not want to miss!We want to thank all our guests for an amazing year, and we hope to see you in 2023. We wish you a happy new year!About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

In this episode, we talk to Maria-Anastasia Moustaka, a software engineer and robotics trainer and mentor. She is a Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, Microsoft IoT MVP and has won many international robotics competitions with her robotics club ULP. We dive into what her first steps were with IoT and robotics, which started when she saw that her university had a robotics team. She bought her own robotics kit, practiced building robotics for a year, and gained knowledge about Arduino before joining the team. And we talk about robotics competitions, their requirements, and challenges. She explains that the languages she used in these competitions were mostly C++ and Java, but now she prefers .NET. Furthermore, we talk about her being a Gold Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador, a community for students who want to learn all about Microsoft technologies. She gives presentations and she does Twitch live streams in which she tries to inspire and motivate students to learn more about tech, development, and robotics. As a robotics teacher, she loves to help kids and also women and girls to do more in this tech (robotics) field.About this episode, and Maria-Anastasia in particular: you can find @mariamou_7 on Twitter & GitHub. Check out her 'All about Azure IoT' presentation she gave as a Microsoft Learn Student Ambassador. And, visit her website where you can read her blogs about IoT.About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

In this episode, we talk to Debbie O'Brien, a senior program manager at Microsoft. Where she is in charge of advocating Playwright End-to-End Testing. Debbie has over 10 years of experience in front-end development. We dive straight into why Playwright is becoming increasingly popular. A lot of developers don’t like to write tests; they think it’s boring, takes too much time, or is hard to learn. Debbie explains that one of Playwright’s features is codegen, which generates the tests for you and helps you write better code. What problems do Playwright and codegen solve? And what’s coming in the near future? Moreover, we elaborate on what Playwright exactly is; its best features and benefits, what it does differently, and how easily it integrates. For example, it works in VS Code, you literally only have to press the green triangle to run it. Ultimately, the goal is to make testing a lot easier for people so that we have more people testing. We discuss how the testing world is shifting and how Debbie thinks that we’re moving more towards an end-to-end world rather than unit testing. Because your code changes. You're constantly modifying it. And what this means for the testing community and a company’s testing culture. Furthermore, we talk about the work Debbie’s team has done, and is doing to further advance Playwright. So, if you haven’t tried Playwright yet, give it a try, you won't regret it. About this episode, and Debbie O'Brien in particular: you can find @debs_obrien on Twitter & GitHub. And, don't forget to check out her website where you can find all her blogs and videos with all her courses. About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

In this episode, we talk to Rik Hepworth. As Microsoft Azure MVP, member of the Microsoft Regional Director program, and Chief Consulting Officer at Black Marble, he helps organizations make better use of the cloud. We talk about his role at Black Marble and how it is a development shop at heart; helping customers reach a higher level of maturity in terms of Application Lifecycle Management or DevOps, and helping them with app modernization, cloud adoption and migration. And we dive into the entire process of getting an on-premises solution ready for migration to the cloud in small baby steps. Talking about the reasons their customers need to move to the cloud, the difficulties and challenges they face with migration projects, and how to deal with them; he has broken this down into five stages of app migration. Subsequent, he explains that organizations need to be aware of two great things: business value and risk. And business value has got to be the principal driver for pushing you to the cloud, but in doing so, you need to minimize risk. That might mean foregoing a full cloud migration, opting for a hybrid solution and experimenting with an agile model of migration. Because a big plus of cloud computing is experimentation, trying out cloud services and solutions, just to switch it off if it doesn’t work. Which is more difficult with hardware. And as Rik explains, most businesses don’t realize how big of a deal this is; they need to start their migration project years before they decommission their database (licenses) and hardware. You need to look forward, because businesses and IT are evolving rapidly, especially in the last 10 years. Thus, are you ready for cloud migration?About this episode, and Rik Hepworth in particular: you can find @rikhepworth on Twitter and GitHub. Check out his website and read his blogs. About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

In this episode, we talk to Marc Duiker, he is a senior developer advocate at Ably and has a strong focus on event-driven architectures in the Azure cloud and serverless technologies. He started Azure Functions University on GitHub, a free and open-source learning curriculum. He likes to create pixel art, code visuals & music, and design retro games. We talk about his job at Ably, everything you need to know about Ably and their SaaS product; real-time communication, native WebSockets, its security, and how it compares to Azure Web PubSub are discussed. And he shares what it's like to move from a consulting role in a services company to a technology company making a technical product. We dive into his hobbies of creating pixel artwork and small retro games, for example, his Azure Function logo game. How his pixel art avatars went, sort of, viral. How he even added pixel art animals to the VS Code Pets extension. And learning new techniques or languages in the process, such as TypeScript. Furthermore, Marc is probably one of the biggest advocates of Serverless and Azure Functions in the Netherlands. So, we touch upon why he thinks Serverless is so powerful, his Azure Functions University on GitHub, and creating custom bindings.     About this episode, and Marc Duiker in particular: you can find @marcduiker on Twitter, GitHub and his Azure Functions University GitHub. And, don't forget to read his blogs and his recent blog on Cloud PubSub services compared: Azure Web PubSub vs Ably. You can also find all of his links and his retro games via his Linktree.About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel

In this episode, we talk to Dylan Beattie, who is a Microsoft MVP and international keynote speaker. He is the director of Ursatile, the creator of the Rockstar programming language, and has performed his software-themed parodies of classic rock songs all over the world as Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers. We talk about his programming language – Rockstar - in which he writes programs that resemble bad song lyrics. It started as a joke, but it actually worked and went viral. And how it made him use technologies like Rust, Scala and Python, or techniques like building interpreters in JavaScript, parsing expression grammar, recursive descent parsing, continuation passing, flow control, and more. We dive deeper into the fact that people do better work when they are enjoying themselves. Real software development is a craft, where we solve problems that have never been solved before. It can be a difficult and frustrating process; you get stuck and we underestimate how much time it can take. Sometimes you have to step back and do something else to get that creative process going again – tip: take a notebook with you so you don’t forget your good ideas. We also discuss the basics every developer should know, what skills a developer should have, and how there are three kinds of software that you might write. And, last but not least, we talk about how Windows as a development platform has gotten a lot better in the last 25 years, about different programming languages, especially C# and .NET, about (programming) language proficiency versus fluency, about translating programming expertise from one language to another, and his love for JavaScript. About this episode, and Dylan Beattie in particular: you can find @dylanbeattie on Twitter and GitHub. Check out his website dylanbeattie.net and The Rockstar programming language at codewithrockstar.com. And, listen to 'Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers' music on his YouTube channel.  About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel 

In this episode, we talk to Scott Hanselman, who works in Open Source on .NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft and is a well-known – perhaps famous - face in the .NET community. He has been a developer for 30 years, has been blogging at hanselman.com for 20 years, has been podcasting for hanselminutes.com and Azure Friday for more than 15 years, and has written a number of technical books. We talk about how he creates his ‘edutainment’; providing entertainment and education, keeping it fun and yet making people think about all the possibilities. For example, by bringing old technology into the modern world, as he recently did by connecting a Commodore 64 to the internet. So it’s half fun, half getting people's brains working. We discuss why he likes to visit thrift shops and the importance of the right to repair; he does not want to be a part of the throwaway society – waste not, want not - and prefers to give away his obsolete (tech) items to someone who can use them. We also dive a little deeper into his Microsoft journey, as he received his 15-year congratulatory email this month. He recalls his collaboration with Scott Guthrie to work on Ruby on Rails and his participation in the first open-source .NET project. Especially zooming in on the change from closed-source to source-open – Rotor as Microsoft called it – to finally truly open-source. And what it entailed to get here. About this episode, and Scott Hanselman in particular: you can find @shanselman on Twitter and GitHub. Check out his blogs on hanselman.com or watch his video's on his YouTube channel. Also, don't forget to check out his TikTok and listen to his podcasts 'hanselminutes'. About Betatalks: have a look at our videos and join us on our Betatalks Discord channel