A warm welcome to Gregor Suttie, Azure MVP as he joins us for ‘Voices of the Azure Community’. Gregor helps run the Glasgow Azure User group and organise the Azure Global BootCamp Glasgow edition
We hope you enjoy this insight into the work Gregor carries out to support the Azure Community.
Please tell us about your own role.
I am the Head of Development Services for Sword IT, I run the development team and I ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible service we can with a team of technical experts.
Please outline your involvement with the Scottish Azure User Group and Scottish Summit 2020
Sarah Lean is the founder of the Glasgow Azure user Group and does all the hard work, I just tend to help out when required, so I can’t say I do too much on that front to be honest but I do get a lot of people asking me if they can speak at our events and I pass then onto Sarah.
You are also involved with ‘Cloud Family’ could you tell us about that?
Yes the Cloud Family is an idea I had with Richard Hooper, we wanted to try to bring the Azure Community together and grow the Azure community, there are a lot of very supportive people out there and when people come together lots of cool ideas start bearing fruit. The Cloud Family is a community for Cloud minded people to come and share their passion, we have a website and a slack channel and are growing month on month.
In your opinion what is the most exciting thing about working with Azure?
Azure is the enabler for everyone to build incredible global applications which can reach everyone on any device, the most exciting part for me is building the applications on Azure that save lives, save customers money and help them deliver to their customers. We have been able to build some very sophisticated multi-region apps for customers and seeing these come to life has been a personal thrill in my role.
What is your favorite Azure Product and why?
Azure CosmosDB is still make favourite product because it is a very clever piece of technology, we have used it on customer projects and its incredibly fast and easy to use and now with a free tier everyone should check it out.
What are the key skills required to be a great Azure Developer?
Dedication, you have to be willing to learn and put your learning into action, you can learn all day but if you’re not trying things out, seeing what the product can and cannot do your not going to learn the pros and cons. Reading about services is great but using the services takes your learning to a different level.
What in your opinion has been the biggest advance in Azure in the past 18 months?
I don’t think there has been one outstanding thing to be honest, there have been new services announced, new datacentres, and new features continue to come out at a rate of knots, until we see Quantum computing things will continue to advance but not in a massive way I don’t think personally.
What are the biggest challenges you face working with Azure?
The number of services Azure has is huge and I have a good understanding of most of them, I wouldn’t have time to learn them all to a deep understanding level and that’s where I can call upon the Azure community for help.
With the Covid-19 crisis, how has the Scottish Azure Community adapted to continue to provide valuable support and connections within the Community?
Like a lot of Azure communities, we have had to move to online events which work well, its much easier for speakers to be able to speak at numerous events with it all being online now.
How did you become an MVP? Do you have suggestions for other community members who hope to become MVP’s?
I became an MVP in Azure for my community contributions in the DevOps area, I would blog a fair bit on Azure DevOps and was a technical reviewer for a book on Azure DevOps. For community members looking to become an MVP, keep doing what you are doing and the community will take notice and hopefully someone will nominate you and take it from there.
