This week, Richard Jackson (Cloud Software Engineer) visited London for two sessions at Microsoft Reactor, and to present a talk at Umbraco London.

The first session at Microsoft Reactor was Global Azure Bootcamp 2023 – London. Co-organised by Callum Whyte and Poornima Nayer, the day of talks was part of a world-wide community-driven event learning about Microsoft Azure. The speakers were consistently excellent throughout, covering topics such as container apps, chaos studio and open AI. Rich is now looking to set-up the Cardiff edition for 2024 - watch this space!

The second session at Microsoft Reactor was “Build Innovative Apps with Enterprise Resiliency” and was hosted by Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect Manager and Nightingale HQ co-founder Steph Locke. This event discussed different methods and technique supporting building applications and databases suitable for real-world scenarios, including discussions around appropriate software architectures for different use cases. Of specific interest was Tighe Brennan’s talk on, amongst other things, using AI tooling to refresh and rejuvenate older technologies, with Microsoft’s own “Bing” search engine taking on a new lease of life through its integration with Open AI technologies.

Finally, Rich was invited to present at Umbraco London, a community-run event hosted (again!) by Callum Whyte. Rich’s talk, “.NET, Azure and Umbraco: The First Twelve Months”, was well received, organically dissolving into constructive discussion within the audience of experienced Umbraco users on topics such as on-boarding and supporting new users, with Rich’s own feedback and opinions from his relatively inexperienced perspective being heard and respected. Alongside his talk was Mike Masey of Husky Ltd. giving an overview of UMBRAAD, Umbraco’s accessibility conference which had been held earlier that day, and Mikkel Keller Stubkjær of Novicell giving mind-blowing insight into the benefits of when composable infrastructure is used correctly.

(It should also be highlighted that, as he was in London, Rich was unable to attend UmbraCymru, the Cardiff-based Umbraco community event, and therefore had to miss Carl Sargunar’s talk “GitHub Actions and Umbraco”, which he is thoroughly gutted about.)

It was a joy to be able to attend these events and gain further insight into the sheer amount of possibilities and opportunities around the tooling we currently use at Nightingale HQ, and we look forward to being able to utilise the learnings gathered from these events for our customers in future.