Stef’s Monthly Update – January 2017
Usually like most of my blogger friends I
do a write up of what I have done and experienced at the end of the year. I
write a year’s review, post a few pictures and publish it. During 2017 I want
to do things differently, I’ll write a review post every month and look ahead a
bit in the upcoming months.
Why Stef instead of Steef-Jan my real name? Well the explanation
is that many of my international buddies call me Stef, rather than my full
name. And that’s fine, I do not mind at all. Thus, I have decided I will call
or label my monthly updates as Stef’s
Monthly Update.
What have I been up to in January? I have written
a few blog posts for BizTalk360’s blog.
Last year at the MVP in November,
Saravana asked me if I was interested in writing a biweekly guest blog post
with integration in mind. And I said yes let’s do that and I started in
December with two posts:
- Archiving BizTalk Messages using Logic App and DocumentDB
- Getting started with Azure Functions and using them within Logic Apps
- Using Azure Service Bus and BizTalk 2016 for messaging between enterprises
- Using Flow or Logic Apps to sync documents
Creating these blog posts is fun to do, you
explore a new technology or get a bit more insight in building solutions with
Logic App as a new cloud integration service. As a matter a fact, one my latest
projects with Logic Apps for one of Macaw
customers went live this month. So, I have gained experience in building and
deploying Logic Apps to production. Awesome!
What I like about BizTalk360 is that besides providing a
platform for blogs, it sponsors and supports the Integration Mondays for over
two years now. And this has been revamp into the Integration User Group, that is
the integration Mondays are part of it together with Middleware Friday. The
latter is a weekly update by Kent Weare a
recorded session every week, and has 4 episodes so far. As for integration
Monday, a set of speakers is line up all to way to the end of April and I will
be one of them in March.
What else have I been up to? I have written
an article for the Dutch SDN
Magazine in Dutch, which has been a
quite a while (a couple years I believe) since I have done that. Thanks to Marcel Meijer and Lex Hegt, both for reviewing the article.
It is ready to be published in the upcoming magazine 131. The article is about
Server less Integration using Logic
Apps and Functions. As you
might realize that means no more VM’s, just a Browser and Azure J
The benefit of writing that article was
that I can also will present on the topic at the SDN Event in March. Super! And I’ll be on stage next month
too, in New Zealand and Australia. Yes, this cool and this evolved from what
happened last year. On the plane, back from Gothenburg, where me and Eldert did some talks we came up
with the idea of going down under. A few weeks later we booked the tickets
after we spoke with Mick Badran and Rene Brauwers. Rene has set up a Meetup
in Sydney and Mark Brimble
together with Craig Haiden one
in Auckland. And we’ll
probably have one in Melbourne and Brisbane too. Cool, eh!
During my trip, down under there’s an
Ignite going on too in the Gold Coast.
Eldert will be going there and meanwhile I’ll be a few days in Auckland, before I join him
at the end of the event. We’ll be meeting up with Dan Toomey, Dean Robertson, some other Team Mexia guys/gals, the Microsoft PG
(Jeff Holan, Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey), and fellow MVP Martin Abbott. So, will be mixing up work with
leisure time while I am down there.
In this month, I read a few books on
various topics, entrepreneurial, social media and politics. The first one being
a book from Gary Vaynerchuck Ask GaryVee. Why the entrepreneurial topic, why the
interest? Kent Weare my buddy
mentioned this guy, as one of the hottest entrepreneurs at the moment, a few
times and point to some points he stands for. Hence, I looked at a few YouTube movies of GaryVee, bought one of his books and read
it. Besides this one I read another one, which I stumbled on called “Your One Word” by Evan Carmichael. And through GaryVee I also got interested in the “The
Social Organism” book and read that one too.
Three books in total in combination of two
other books, which I picked up while reading the Correspondent website:
- Utopia for realists. This book deals with an ideal world that we all have enough money, and can live happy lives. It discusses experiments with a base income for people. However, all these experiments have been done on a small scale and it yet needs to prove itself on a large scale. Politically is can be a hard sell.
- Je hebt wel iets te verbergen (You do have something to hide). A book that discussed our privacy in this day and age being online every day with all your device. Interesting read as everything we do these days is being tracked and used for all kinds of purposes like profiling, ectera.
- Pain of Salvation - In the Passing Light of Day
- Sepultura – Machine Messiah
- Kreator – Gods of Violence
Besides writing, preparing content, reading
and listening to music have I been doing some workouts? Yes, I have done a few
runs to prepare for a half marathon of The Hague in March and a full marathon
in April (Rotterdam).
There you have it Stef’s first Monthly
Update and I can look back with joy. Accomplished quite a few things and
exciting moments are ahead of me.
Cheers,
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