My Azure Week 34

This blog post is about my reflections on various topics around Azure, and what I have learned and worked on over the past week.

The 10X Rule, and why I started to post Azure content on LinkedIn

I like the evenings sitting on the couch in front of the TV and relax. At the same time, I hate it. I hate it because I’m burning my time . Time that I never will get back. I will never get any smarter by watching television and doing nothing. I would rather like to burn money than time. What I really want is to become great with Azure, and build great services together with my team. So, I read the book “The 10X Rule” by Grant Cardone. First of all, I love this book. It tells the reader that success will come easy - if you follow the 10X rule. As I’m easy to convince, I gave it a shot and started to live 10X in one area - for now. Without going into the details, I started to post Azure related content on LinkedIn all day long - please connect with me on LinkedIn :) At first, it was easy to find content because I could just post what I already knew. I spend 1-2 hours in the evenings and prepared the content for the next day. Then it became harder finding good content that I’d like to share. I had to read articles, news, blog posts, and watch videos on YouTube to collect all the content I think has great value. To make it short, I learned a lot about Microsoft Azure over the past week. It’s also super fun to be able to share that new knowledge with others. I will definitely continue.

Preparation for my Azure App Configuration Workshop

Some months ago, I read about a service called Azure App Configuration. Somehow I got super interested in this service, and started to play with it. This week I committed myself to give a talk or hold a workshop about it at my own Azure community Azure Meetup Oslo. I spend some evenings to prepare some tasks that I will demonstrate. There’s still a lot to learn about the service and a lot to prepare. The date will be in September, right after my workshop about Azure API Management at NDC Minnesota. I will soon publish the exact date.

Learning ARM

ARM templates seemed to me always a bit weird. I think it’s because it feels so different than what I am used to. I’ve been using PowerShell for most of the tasks when managing resources in Azure. But this time, I wanted to -or had to- provision a NodeJS Web App on App Service with App Configuration that I deployed with ARM -so I throw myself into the unknown. I liked it. I think I liked it because I saw that it isn’t hard to learn. I continued to do more with ARM and experimented with Deployment Scripts for executing code from within ARM. The possibilities are endless which makes it so interesting and fun. You can read more about Deployment Scripts in my previous blog post.

My very first NodeJS web app

We have a task in my team were we want to create a service that publishes some data as Json. After some discussions internally, we decided to create a NodeJS Web App on Azure App Service with Azure App Configuration. I’ve never worked with NodeJS before, so I spend each morning over the summer and studied NodeJS on Udemy (Udemy is an online course provider). What a great course! The first version of the service is running, and I am super happy with it. I have not just learned NodeJS, but I have also learned how much valuable 1-2 hours a day of studying is. It’s fun, I know more, I can share more, and I am more valuable to others. I will definitely continue with it.

Conclusion

That was my very first week of reflecting actively over what I’ve done and learned last week. I aim for many more “episodes” the coming weeks where I will focus a bit more on Azure and its services.