Today I feel quite relieved.
Yesterday I organized my first big event, Athens Azure Bootcamp 2016, part of a much larger event called Global Azure Bootcamp 2016, with the help of a very good friend of mine, Kostas Pantos.
What is the Global Azure Bootcamp?
In short, it’s a one-day deep dive class into Azure, the objective of which is to help thousands of people get up to speed with developing Cloud Computing Applications for Azure.
It all started back in 2013, when a group of Microsoft Azure MVPs had the idea of organizing a Microsoft Azure Bootcamp at several locations throughout Europe at the same time. The small group quickly settled on the basics of the event and then they made it BIG! In 2013, more than 90 locations around the globe participated!
In 2014, the event was held for the first time in Athens, Greece, while this year, 2016, more than 180 locations hosted the event.
Global Azure Bootcamp 2016 Athens, Greece
We woke up early, drunk some coffee and started preparing the room where the main event would be held.
At around 09:00 people started arriving at the venue and by the time I was about to deliver my speech the room was full.
My presentation was about “Building & Deploying applications using Microsoft Azure”.
I tried to sum up in just one hour as much as I could about Microsoft Azure.
My demo was about playing with photos. The main points of my presentation were the following:
- Providing general information about Microsoft Azure and the services it offers.
- Creating an ASP.NET 5 app running on Mac.
- Publishing the app on Azure Web App using GitHub and continuous deployment.
- Moving on to Windows and talking about tools of the Visual Studio which can be used to manage and monitor Azure.
- Explaining the benefits of Applications Insights.
- Adding the SQL Azure database to store my data and the Azure Blob Storage to store the photos that I was going to upload.
- Uploading the first photo and using the Face Api to find the faces on the uploaded picture. This certainly drew the attention of the attendees!
- Taking a picture of the front-row attendees, using my mobile phone; with the use of SignalR, the picture showed up on the big screen and only seconds later the app recognized some of the faces. I clicked on some of them and started telling the attendees their age, while a bar showed how much they were smiling.
- Providing information about WebJobs and the KUDU service.
You may find the code used in my demo here, in my GitHub profile page.
Following my presentation, we had a full day and our agenda comprised interesting topics, namely:
- Optimize website performance/testing (speakers: Alexandros Fatles, Giorgos Basagiannis)
- Build Always-On, Hyper-Scalable Microservice-based Cloud Services (speaker: Kostas Pantos)
- Azure Elastic SQL Database (speaker: Antonios Chatzipavlis)
- Azure Search, Solr, Elastic Search (speaker: Vasilis Aivalis)
- Web API on the rocks (speaker: Stavros Menegos)
We closed the event with a gifts draw and many happy winners, and with our lab, a 3D racing game!
Overall, I was quite happy with the outcome. People enjoyed it and everything went as planned.
Till the next event, enjoy coding and Microsoft Azure 🙂
Here is a gallery from yesterday’s event. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
