Screaming in the Cloud - Building a Developer-Focused Digital Event with Microsoft’s Jeff Sandquist

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

About Jeff SandquistJeff leads Developer Relations for the cloud at Microsoft, leading the team reinventing Microsoft's relationship with software developers around the globe. Their team is maniacal about making the world amazing for developers of all backgrounds.They are excited to support and contribute to open source platforms, tools, and processes. As Developer Advocates, they’re spreading awareness of Azure and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. Great online content (docs, demos, videos, code) is the foundation of everything they do.They create global developer online experiences for Microsoft like docs.microsoft.com, Channel 9, and dev.microsoft.com. They connect with developer communities through their programs including Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Regional Director, their annual Build conference and third-party developer events around the globe.Links ReferencedMicrosoft.com/learnMicrosoft.com/learn/tvbronconamedsue.com

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. With simple, predictable pricing that's flat across 12 global data center regions and a UX developers around the world love, you can control your cloud infrastructure costs and have more time for your team to focus on growing your business.

See what businesses are building on DigitalOcean and get started for free at do.co slash screaming. That's do.co slash screaming. That's do.co slash screaming. And my thanks to DigitalOcean for their continuing support of this ridiculous podcast. This episode is brought to you by Spot.io, the continuous cloud cost optimization platform saving businesses millions of dollars each year

on their cloud bills. Used by some of the world's largest enterprises and fastest-growing startups like Intel and Samsung, those are enterprises, and Duolingo, that's a startup, Spot.io delivers the optimal balance of cost and performance by leveraging Spot instances, reserve capacity, and on-demand. Give your workloads the infrastructure they deserve. Always available, always scalable, and always at the lowest possible cost. Visit spot.io to learn more. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Corporate Vice President at Microsoft of Developer Relations, Jeff Sanquist.

Jeff, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Corey. Great to be here. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. So you are a Corporate Vice President, three words, each one of which tells me that Twitter means something bad. But the Developer Relations part is the rest of it. What does that mean? Where do you start and where do you stop professionally? You know, I work in engineering. I work in Scott Guthrie's organization. And we see developer relations as an engineering discipline.

And we believe that's, you know, really something kind of simple. It's about helping developers. So we build the services that run documentation, our learning platform, localization, ensure that our products get to developers around the world and are really able to be used by many. And a big part of that is advocacy, our cloud advocates. And it's really developed relations to me is really about going where developers are and being able to connect with them authentically, advocate about a community, Node, Python, and really bringing them inside to Microsoft and helping them understand why we make the decisions we do and what will it take for them to be able to use our products. At the end of the day, we're just here to help.

One thing that I found that was super interesting, at least from my somewhat naive perspective, is that I know an awful lot of people who work for Microsoft's Developer Relations org, specifically over in Azure. And they say a lot of things. Oh, do they say things. But one thing that they don't say is nothing that has ever come across my radar as an explicit sales pitch for Azure. So the old trope about developer relations, dev rel, being a dev reliper, whatever term you choose to use, it does not translate in your interpretation of it into a sales force with credibility, as best I can tell. We help first, right? And I think, you know, maybe even just kind of step back is that a few years back, we made a decision to, in a lot of docs, not just for.NET Windows, but for Node, Python, Go, right?

Like, you know, Azure is a cloud that really any developer should use, and it has to start with docs. But our advocacy work is really founded in the principles of everything starts with great content. We go where developers are, and we bring them back to Microsoft. And our approach when we went to restart things was really about aligning with communities. So, you know, I'm sure at one point in time at Microsoft, we probably had a Windows Start Menu advocacy or evangelism team,

or a team that was for our own Windows server. And when we started developer advocacy at Microsoft, we built our teams around communities. So I have a team that focuses on Node, and those people come from the Node community and live with that community. And they spend all of their time advocating on behalf of that community in engineering.

How do we need to be looking at our docs? How do we make this product easier? How do we make it, you know, like five minutes to wow. And around that of our people being from those communities, right? It gave us a connection to those communities, but I actually think it actually changes the tone of the conversation because we're not taking someone from Microsoft that may have grown up through experience with.NET or Windows or Visual Studio and saying, hey, be a Linux person or be a Node person. That's almost like asking somebody to be a poser.

We hired people from those communities that are genuinely part of it. And we embrace that. And I think that's where that comes through. We also, you know, these people aren't on quota. We're not in marketing. We're in engineering. And we run this as an engineering team with sprints.

It's really about connecting with those customers. And to that end, we're having this conversation right after your Build conference finished, which I've got to say was nothing short of astonishing from my perspective. We went into worldwide lockdown about three months ago, give or take, which means you didn't have a whole lot of time beyond that

to transition the event into a fully remote digital experience, to borrow from your marketing's overly corporate phrasing. But you really pulled it off in ways I was not expecting. Oh, great. It's going to be 48 straight hours of content. And it was, but it was structured in such a way that made sense. A certain competitor of yours just announced the same week

that they're going to be doing their online conference for eight weeks. I imagine that they could easily spend that much time talking at their customers but I'm not sure anyone wants to hear it. This was, it felt like the perfect amount of time and it leveraged the remote aspect in a way that I was not expecting. I frankly expect it to be a terrible half-assed version of an in-person conference. And it was very much not that at all. How did this happen? How did this happen? You know, explain yourself. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder how it's happened too, but how did Build happen? Build happened because of just a phenomenal group of people,

like an absolute team sport. I had a great partner on this guy named Bob Bajon, who's been working on events forever. And about eight weeks ago, probably shorter than that, we knew that Build was not going to happen. And you saw like events being canceled and so forth. And we made the decision as a company that we were going to start Build. We were going to make it free and we were going to make it online.

And both of those make sense, but I expected the third bullet point there that you didn't hit was, and you're going to postpone it. Yeah, and we did not postpone it. And I would say, you know, I'm going to use a quote that Scott Hansen, when it was quoted in On the Verge in an article, he said, hey, we didn't just pull this out of our butt. We created an all-new event. It was quite eloquent. Oh, yeah, there was some joking about that going around on Twitter, but I'm in favor of quotes like that. It's heaven forbid that due to that quote,

one of our folks sounded like a human being. Yeah, that is not a failure mode in any realistic sense for any customer you want to deal with. And being a human, what a great way to put it. That's what this was all about. So eight weeks ago, we rewrote the event. We started from the ground up and said, we cannot run this with somebody for three hours in front

of a podium going through product announcements. We have to design this for really the attention of the internet. We have to make this entertaining and really even being careful, right? Because, you know, COVID-19 is going on, you know, people are going through all sorts of different things, but we knew we had to bring the community together. We knew that we had to go connect with the community, both ourselves. And we knew if we're going to do this, we had to do a few things, which was one, really start and build an event and adjust the overall flow and timing of it. So we didn't do those long keynotes. We shortened them up, right? Small segments, right? We did Imagine Cup, which is something we've done always at these events with our students, right? That was

a shorter, smaller bit. And we really started writing the show. When we work on an event like this, we always do this. We treat it like a movie. We have a writer's room. Three times a week, we get together and we start adding people into that group and we start writing the story of the event. Now, this isn't like the story of what product news we're landing and exactly what that announcement is yet. This is about talking about the overall story of the event. We start writing that out. And I think it's really important to know is that we started this eight weeks ago from the ground up. We were planning an event called Build. And so we decided that, no, we're going to do a whole new session process.

We're going to shorten these to small segments. There's a lot of us at the company. You know, I started a thing called Channel 9 with a group of people quite some time ago. And it was progressive at the time. It was really about... Oh, yeah. Big fan. Getting people with video cameras and allowing people to meet

the people behind our products. We have a lot of people that work with media, much like you. I'm a kind of hacker at it as well, that love the space and connecting with people on social. And so there's a lot of people that got it. Like we cannot just go up and push sessions out. So as we crafted the event, we started really working with our speakers and we ran speaker training. And the speaker training was really about how do you hold an audience? How can we ask the questions differently? What are the things that are, you know, that streaming does to kind of bring an audience

in? How do you do these demos? And that became this area of the event. You saw Scott Hanselman do a keynote where he completely changed it based on the modality, bringing people into meetings via Teams and bringing people into the overall keynote. And I think really what happened is it kind of became a life of its own. You can imagine in a company after you do an event and you can look at the press out there, there's been like phenomenal engagement numbers around the event. What was so special about this is it truly felt like it was just a solid core group of people that cared about developers. And it was just this like, hey, how are we going to do this? The answers were always, we'll figure it out. And I'll be honest, there were some areas, if you go around the event, you're going to see where it was like rough around the edges. That's because we were repurposing infrastructure that for session videos

and live that maybe we built five years ago and we weren't quite using anymore. And as the time started leading up to the event and we got ready to announce registration for it, could not believe what was happening for really just sign up and getting people to attend the event. Let me look for some of these things. Here's numbers. So a couple of things like we knew, right? There are people like around our company. We live and breathe community, right? We're part of those communities, right?

We live there and we wanted to get out and get with them. We were hearing from people too, right? Our customers were quarantined at home too. A lot of people looking for online content to consume. And, you know, let's just kind of talk about the event. At the start of the event, we were well over 200,000 people that registered. I want to put that in perspective. I don't even, Rosalie, we were quite sure what to do with that number, Corey, because like this is a free web streaming event. Like you didn't have to register, but 200,000 people decided that they would. And, you know, we made sure that the streaming was everywhere. The idea we wanted was we wanted no friction. If you want to watch the keynote, great. Watch it or watch the sessions. You can do so via Twitter. You can do on our own properties.

And they don't appear to be edited either. So if someone had spilled a cup of coffee over themselves, you can still grab that and just go loop that as your new Zoom background. You could, and I'm sure you'll find some happy... Sorry, Teams background. I forgot who I'm talking to for a moment there. Yeah, Teams background. But hey, we go where developers are. So sometimes we might be using Zoom. We might be using many of those things, right? But we're at 200,000 registrations. Guess what? People still kept registering, even when the event's going on. Tens of thousands of people. And they were in chat rooms and attending those sessions. And it was going

on in Twitter. Guess what, though? You know what the average viewing duration was of our users? 161 minutes. 95% of our presenters were remote. Heck, we had several hundred people delivering their program from their bedrooms or home offices in their kitchen. There's a global audience. 80%, you know, historically was US attendees for events, 20% around the world. 65% of our audience was from around the world. And we made the decision, and I was so proud of the team, we're going to go 48 hours straight. And there's a very small number of people, you know, probably like, what is it, like 0.01% of our customers, really of any company that ever get to a major developer event. And we didn't want to do something where we just showed up to the U.S. and like, hey, did something great and ran pre-recorded materials through the night. We wanted to go around the world and we wanted to follow the sun. When we did that, right, sessions that we did during the

day, when it became the evening, we ran them again. Scott Hanselman did this great talk on really this.NET Futures talk. They delivered it last night at two in the morning. Now, sometimes we did pre-recorded talks, right? And we kind of, we run them again. So we showed up in the chat room and we're up front about, hey, this isrecorded yeah that's why i can answer your questions but i'm here to answer that and it was really about making that connection in the community and paying it off for our customers that are you know all around the world and giving them an outlet i'm really proud of our team too because what we did was we did a live, kind of a sports desk, so to speak. And that was my advocacy team, right?

They were out there and they're great online. They're great at making things interesting. One thing that really stuck out to me was my favorite talk of Build was a pre-recorded talk that Emily Freeman did, where she talked about building remote DevOps cultures. And she's always a good speaker, always gives a good talk. And at the end of her pre-recorded talk, it turned into a screen split with someone that she was talking to who asked questions from the chat that people had asked just then.

And she answered, and oh my God, it wasn't pre-recorded. This was done live. And that completely caught me off guard at the end of that, just because it was so well-polished and no glitches whatsoever that I had just assumed that, oh the end of that, just because it was so well polished and no glitches whatsoever that I had just assumed that, oh yeah, of course, it's going to be a video thing. Why wouldn't you pre-record it? It really forced me to reassess how, I guess, proficient at this, both she was personally, as well as the entire team. Doing the right thing at the right time, right? Kind of like having the right Lego box. A little bit further back, probably about 12 weeks ago, we started seeing some of

our key flagship events having to be canceled, you know, due to COVID-19. And, you know, our team, we live in media, we're doing videos and short bits, and we build an overall skilling platform that's kind of part of this is pretty interesting. But, you know, we started kind of building out small nuggets of content. And so what we tried to look at is like, hey, what's the best use of time and how do we make the most of this? And I think when you go to an event, if you're like me, it's hallway conversations. I want to get a question answered that I can get answered nowhere else. So maybe for Emily, it was like, hey, let's do a pre-recorded talk because of timing, but let's be there, right? Let's be with a chat room with our customers. Just to be very clear, it wasn't a pre-recorded talk. It was so polished,

I assumed it was, just for absolute clarity on that point. Okay, that is clarity because I was like, I was at actually Emily's talk and watched the second one. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. And I'd say, you know, a lot of talk and watched the second one. Yeah, it was amazing. Yeah. And I'd say, you know, a lot of the people that are across our team and company, right, they're comfortable with doing online. The advocacy team that I lead is about online outreach, right? We, sure, right? We go to third-party events and communities and even our first-party ones, right?

But it's about connecting with developers where they are. And guess what? We go where developers are, they're online right now. And so that's where we are. That's not just video, that's GitHub contributing to open source projects. But I do believe, you know, at our company, and this goes way back, you know, Microsoft in many ways has probably and easily the most liberal social media policy of any company around the planet, right? We trust our employees to get out there and communicate authentically. And we say, come as you are and do what you love. And we mean that, right? That we mean that when you are speaking at a talk, be Emily, be Jeff, be Corey, right?

Be an engineer and be that person that a developer wants to talk to, right? Even how we build out the events. Satya will say this over and over. Hey, come work at Microsoft, but make sure you use Microsoft as a platform to be able to do what you believe in in the world. And he really means that. And so you saw things around like build for good or areas that we, you know, did certain things with students, right? Those are areas that people at our company will have a passion for and it manifests in the event. And so when I was talking about that writing room and

how we write the story of the event, that is a lot like, you know, when people write a TV show, we're in that room, we're coming up with ideas. Not all of them do we go do, you know, when people write a TV show. We're in that room, we're coming up with ideas. Not all of them do we go do, thank goodness. But that is really about how do we deliver on something great for our customers and something for the community. And we really mean that. And that comes through, it's paid off with what I believe we've got some of the best presenters in the world, in the industry, in our company and our team. And guess what? They're all making the adjustments. Not all are just advocates that are used to being online. Through this, we purposely reworked our speaker

training and dry run approach to be designed for this medium. And we helped one another. By the way, lighting, this is like the Achilles heel. Oh my God, yes. Same problem in my world. It's the camera, I can make that work. Audio, I do podcasts and I sound amazing. But lighting is the bane of my existence for these things. What's awesome though,

and I mentioned a guy named Bob Bajon who was really my partner in crime on the event. He's got years of TV production and it's really this fun dynamic we have an amazing group of people that are pro style they produce our shows our events and videos and it's just a phenomenal team and I've tweeted some behind the scenes pictures of things that were happening around the event now they're pros at a lot of this stuff, right? From lighting and lighting sets. And, you know, I was like talking to one of them. I said, Hey, I got a TV in the back of my office that I want to run and play videos. I don't know how to do it. I have these key lights and they're showing up. And, and, and I'm literally chatting

with this, one of the producers and he says, Oh, you need to get some gaffer tape. And I didn't even know what gaffer tape was until this. And he helped me kind of understand how I build kind of a crown around with a gaffer tape around the light. And this is actually just like a fun part of the event is like as we went to COVID-19, we're all trying to figure out how do you lead teams?

How do you connect with developers and do so online? We're all kind of figuring out together. And so you see many of us kind of like literally decking out our battle stations, right? And a year ago, we probably had a nice, simple, minimal desk. And now we're in this battle station with microphones and stream decks. But what's been fun about is we're learning together, right?

People are helping one another. We're learning how to even use things like OBS. We're pretty nerdy about it. And we're building ways so that we can really connect with people because, you know, right now, the world needs community now more than it ever has. I totally, completely see that and believe it. It's lonely. We're at home.

We're trying to connect. We're not getting out to conferences to meet with the people that we care about too right and we knew we had to go create something with that and what's been fun is watching people learn kind of new ways of doing that and how excited people get when we're able to connect to them but it's seriously like when sacha says hey we did two years of evolution in two months, totally with an event like this. One thing that I think you nailed that is a common, if not the most common failure mode, is you get the lighting finally mastered. You get the video taken care of. You get the sound done. The upstream is great.

And all of the production quality becomes first class. And the content is garbage, where it's boring, it's crappy, it's nothing anyone cares about. It doesn't matter how well produced it is if it's crap. Whereas people will forgive an awful lot of production snafus for content that's engaging and fun. Ideally, you hit both. And in your case, you did. Oh, thank you. You know, everything starts with great content. And I think, you know, when we started building an event, it's by developers for developers, right? The people building this event are developers or were a developer. And, you know,

it's really about what do developers want to hear? How do we help explain what we're building at Microsoft, right? We're excited about what we're building, right? We want to bring people inside and we want to let them understand why we're building things. We want to be able to share with them why certain things would have bugs or certain ways of using it and where we're headed. And we're out here to listen.

And really, how do we make this product better? How do we hustle? How can we make it that people want to go use it, right? A lot of the work around this one feature, it's this Azure Static Web Apps. We just came out with it. And this is an example of an area that where our advocates, especially for people that work with like the Node community, like how do you make it really easy to deploy static websites? And I've been in the weeds with an event and, you know, I lead a big size team that is doing this.

You imagine a lot of times I'm doing anything but writing code. You know, I was talking to John Pop on my team and John, you know, is from the Node community. He's a cloud advocate and I run this website. That's basically static HTML and it's running in Azure. Really simple. And I use it just to keep up with deploying it. And there was an area of Azure that, you know, John and team really, really, really wanted to make sure that we made it easier for the Node

community. And so we released this thing called Azure Static Web Apps. And I was talking to John and I said, like, how hard is it for me to move over to it? Should I? And he said, which website are you on? I said, well, it's Bronco Namesuit. It's from my Bronco. And I want to move it over to this because I want to start doing some more things with Node and React with it. And he goes, where's your GitHub repo? And I said, OK, here it is. I gave him a link to my GitHub repo for it. And one minute later, he came back and said, you're live. And literally based on that repo, because it was public, in two minutes, he was deployed and running on Azure Static Apps. And for me, one of the things we want to really enable and really get for developers, five minutes to wow. Right.

Okay. I didn't know what this thing was. What are the docs, right? We are grounded. We live in docs. Everything starts with great technical docs, period, right? That's what developers are. And if we can take them from the docs

to deploying something, that's what we want to try and do. Now, we don't do that all the time, but that's what it's all about for me is how do we help? One challenge that I had as I was, I guess, digesting the fire hose of announcements that came out of Bilt was I consistently felt, to be very direct, lost,

where folks were talking about a service I was either directly or tangentially familiar with and then seamlessly transitioned into talking about a service I was either directly or tangentially familiar with, and then seamlessly transitioned into talking about things that are very, to be direct, Microsoft ecosystem, which is not a world I am particularly well versed in for the past decade and a half. So on some level, it felt like I was either missing obvious things, or I was not up to speed where I needed to be. In truth and in practice, it was aimed at folks who are much more aligned with the broader Microsoft ecosystem than I tend to be in large part.

But I'm wondering, for someone in my position, what is the best on-road to, I guess, learning more about this that doesn't involve, step one, go work somewhere that's steeped in the Microsoft ecosystem and spend five years learning all the ins and outs? Well, first, you got to hang out with us a lot more. Oh, there we go. That's number one. But, you know, I think we have at Microsoft some of the best ways to go learn about our platform. And I think it starts with something called Microsoft Learn, Microsoft.com

slash learn. And really, we had to say to you is think about like try Ruby for the cloud. And it's really about the fact that, you know, how do you learn today, right? People have all different ways that they want to learn. And we believe that you want to make it so that people can do 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. And so I think one of the best ways for you to start is start spending time going through Microsoft Learn. And what's kind of unique about it is it's typical training, but it's small bite-sized chunks. It's really built around learning paths where you can do five minutes here. And guess what? If you need that little section, like say it's something around identity, and you come down to another concept that you want to

learn later, guess what? It's checked off and you don't have to do it. And as you work through and answer questions and assess your skills, you get to do a few things. One, we have this thing called Cloud Shell. It's basically our command line interface right in the cloud. When you need to deploy a VM, our Cloud Shell pops onto the screen of Microsoft Learn. You start typing command line commands to deploy a VM. And guess what? It's free. That's a subscription that I run.

We set some group policy around it and you get to go use it free. And so in your company, you don't have to worry about somebody accidentally deploying some Hadoop cluster not knowing what they're doing and probably driving costs up. It's probably something that you know a bit about.

Or maybe once or twice. But it's really about giving that way to go do it and really learn costs up. It's probably something that you know a bit about. Oh, maybe once or twice. But it's really about giving that way to go do it and really learn the platform. Now, we don't just sit there and go do simple if-thens. We actually look at the deployments of the users against that to give them points, right? And so if somebody takes the default settings in the learning and deploys it as is, they get a certain set of points.

But hey, maybe they deploy to a different region or different data centers. They basically kind of build up those skills. And that's something that we've been building out for about the last two years. And it's been unbelievably successful for us. We've had about 72 million monthly active users to our technical docs and learning sites. But on the learn platform alone, and this is relatively a new thing for us over the last couple of years, about 3.9 million registered learners now. And you go from February to March of this year,

it's like 25% month over month. Frankly, we're about 272% year over year. But this Microsoft Learn gets started there. But how developers learn, and I think how we think about our developer relations work is, it's two in the morning, inspiration strikes, you're a developer, you don't go to the marketing pages. You don't go to reading the glossy brochure.

You sure as heck don't go to your procurement manager and say, hey, could I get a license of this? You go to Google, maybe a few percentage of you go to Bing, and you start typing in terms, search terms, you start typing in codes, things like this, and where do you end up? You end up at your docs. And that's why we really focus on having great docs that are localized, that are at least across the 17 languages that we localize Azure, but maybe up to 65 locales around the world. And we care deeply about linguistic quality. We have humans that make sure that both in the community and outside the community that make sure that this is of quality. And we're maniacal about our docs.

And we wanted that to be one of the first thing that a developer sees. Because that to me is great docs is about the ultimate source of empathy. James Governor said this a while back, and it's true, right? How do you get somebody started? And it really starts with that great content. And we care deeply about that. A total renaissance of technical documentation at Microsoft over the years. This episode is sponsored in part by N2WS. You know what you care about? many things, but never backups.

At least until right after you really, really, really needed to care about backups. That's what N2WS does for your AWS account. It allows you to cycle backups through different storage tiers. You can back things up cost-effectively and safely. For a limited time, N2WS is offering you $100 in AWS credits for setting up their free trial, and I encourage you to give it a shot. To learn more, visit snark.cloud slash N2WS. That's snark.cloud slash N2WS. Oh, the documentation is nothing short of spectacular, to be very clear. I wound up pulling up the page you folks have, which I think is a great page to have, by the way.

Explains Azure services through a lens of what AWS's equivalent are. And I don't know Azure services for beans, but I can quote chapter and verse in the AWS side. And I was all setting up to just tear it apart and spend some time dunking on you folks. And I couldn't. It was really, really well done. The other only one or two minor things I saw, and they were more stylistic than anything else. This is an actual legitimately good resource. In fact, the only thing that causes any skepticism around it is the fact that it says Microsoft on the top of it. It was very even-handed and it got it all right. I don't rave about documentation all that often,

but you folks have really hit it out of the park. It's hard work and it is a team sport, I'll often say, right? Like this didn't happen overnight. Our work around documentation and really putting a focus on it has been something that we've been after for many years. It will never be done.

Our docs at Microsoft at one point in time, I think they were scattered across 17 different websites around the company, all varying areas of quality and probably were, you know, very emphasis on.NET Windows. Now we love those, but you know, we're the cloud for Node, JavaScript, right? Go, Kubernetes, right? And so we had to go really kind of rebuild our technical documentation from the ground up and really even build out a platform for it we went and talked to the people at stripe right the twilio right people that really nail it for developer experience and we started small i remember this one night and we made the decision

that we're gonna go after this and you know at any big company it we'd made the decision that we're going to go after this. And at any big company, it isn't just top down, hey, we're going to do this and it happens. Maybe that happens over at another cloud, but you really have to go work with a community and a company to make this happen. And I remember I was actually, it was late at night, it was about two in the morning and I was walking around with my team and we were trying to figure out how we're going to go build a doc site for our company. And somebody said to me, hey, Jeff, what are we going to build for a CMS? And I said, you know, everybody I've ever met who's built a CMS either failed or was fired. I said, let's not do this.

What if we built it on GitHub? And this was years ago. And this was one of the best moves we did. We really standardized on GitHub for our documentation platform. And that gave us a couple of things that were really wonderful. One, you're an employee and you want to make an update to our docs. It's a pull request. Docs are just code. You're a customer and you want to update a doc because you say, hey, this is not accurate, you wanna do it, it's just a pull request. The format and the tools that we really use,

it's just markdown. So we're able to simplify overall, like the tooling that we use is just markdown. We're able to make it that, to contribute to our docs, whether you work at Microsoft or in the community, it's just a pull request. Docs are code, right? And then we just really were able to build, frankly, a very simple platform that was around GitHub where developers are and make it run great for people to be able to update it and participate on it. And it's been a number of years working at it.

And it's not just about the platform. It's also working across the content itself. And this starts at the top. I mean, literally the entire top, the company, and absolutely Scott, like Scott Guthrie, who runs our overall cloud and AI, he absolutely is a champion of docs and really will even run through product reviews.

And as we're going to launch then, okay, let's start going through the docs. What do they look like, right? We spend time on them. I have no trouble believing that because this level of documentation does not come from someone saying, you know, we should really improve the docs

one of these days. This has to come from the top. It has to be a strategic initiative and one that is paid off handsomely top. It has to be a strategic initiative and one that is paid off handsomely. I don't know if a strategic initiative actually will do it. It has to be part of the lifestyle. And sure, you know, we have an amazing team. They report to me there are technical writers. It is like, to me, it's one of the most underappreciated disciplines and crafts of our entire industry. And I think some companies do

a disservice to that role. I'm not at Microsoft. But documentation is not the responsibility solely of a DevRel team or a docs writing team. Docs are about building the product. And so as we build docs, we will write the docs before we should write a line of code. Our docs can be written by our PMs or engineers. And frankly, it's a badge of honor to write great docs because it's hard. And you know what? If the docs take 70 some pages or 17 or seven to write and that's too long, it probably is not a problem with the writer.

It's probably a problem with the user journey. So why wouldn't you want to start writing that out from the beginning? And so it's not just having a great docs team or not about just building on GitHub. This is cultural, right? And Microsoft is a developer-first company. That's how we're founding it. So not only do we talk about this at Scott's level, I've been at, you know, in Satya's leadership team meetings where we've talked about docs and Amy Hood will talk about, oh my gosh, I sent this to a customer and it works so well. And these docs are great. Like we are talking about documentation at that level because it matters so much in our company. And there's no point, there's no point. This is like the very first thing that

Scott talked to me about when I was thinking about coming back to Microsoft. He said, there is no point, Jeff, in going out and doing evangelism and advocacy or developer relations if you cannot go on stage or go online. And after you finish a talk, say, hey, you want to do this? Go to ak.ms slash this and get started. You have to be that way. And it's cultural and it's lifestyle. And you can tell we're really proud of it, but we're never going to be done.

We're never going to be done with our docs. We're always going to be updating them. And that's why we're lucky to have our own GitHub because it makes it fairly easy. One thing that was challenging for me is shifting my mindset away from the lens that I normally look at the cloud space through and coming to a Microsoft-specific one. I was given early access to a lot of the announcements through

the analyst program, which was appreciated and also useful because it turns out I had a really bad take the first time I saw a particular announcement, namely the Azure for Healthcare offering. And my immediate thought on that was that, wow, that's really dumb. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's bifurcating the market and more or less just distracting people from the things that are truly important. And that's the right perspective to take

for other cloud companies. But then I got to thinking, wow, think twice, then write. And what a concept. Embargo's helped with that. And I realized that Microsoft has done exactly this, the industry specificity for many decades now. And it has worked out profoundly well for them across the board. So I'm looking at this and realizing, no, that's not a terrible idea at all.

That is the right differentiation direction to go in. But having time to think and absorb something that goes beyond the 30 seconds it takes me to write a crappy tweet was extraordinarily helpful. And it led me to wonder what other things are being perhaps viewed unfairly through the lens of,

well, if another cloud company did this thing, it would be terrible. Therefore, it must be terrible if Microsoft is doing it too. You know, some companies might call that being customer obsessed, but really, I'm just- Careful, they may have trademarked it by now. They may have, but you know, I think that's the first thing on the healthcare is really about listening to customers and really about, look, we've been out in the enterprise and how

we really are able to deliver solutions and things for those customers is basing them on what they're looking for, right? And that there is based on experience and listening and learning to our customers. Where are we misunderstood in other areas like that? I think it's, you know, what I would want to make sure that if somebody's listening to this podcast

and they're saying, look, why would I trust Microsoft? Or why would I want to go learn more about something of us? Or what do I misunderstand is we're a developer first company. And, you know, I've worked at other companies, but we're not founded in retail, social networking, digital advertising, any of those. And founding moments for companies matter. And don't be confused about this. We were founded with two nerds that were basically building tools for developers, basic for the Altair. Bill and Paul was the very first thing that we were doing as a company. That's our founding

moment. And what was the first thing that they did after they got done? They went off to the Homebrew Computing Club. They went off to go share what they built. They did it at an event. They did it about trying to share something that they truly believed in and were excited about and wanted to share it with other developers. And if you look at us at Microsoft and you're wondering what makes us tick, it's that founding moment. And I think what I love about the Microsoft that I came and returned to is we care about developers because we are too. And because of that moment, understand us that when we are trying to ship products, we're iterating like you. We're trying to make it better. And frankly, we get really excited about the work that we're doing.

And maybe we can do a better job of kind of giving more context. But you ask anyone from Microsoft, why does this work? Or how could I make this work in my environment? We are hungry for the business. We are here to hustle, and we are here to learn from you. And that, combined with our founding moments, is really what drives us. One other thing that really is, I guess, challenging for me, again, not being steep in the ecosystem, is I took a look at the things that were announced, and it turns out there's kind of a lot. What are the highlights? Some of these things are very clearly aimed at, if you're using this product and using it with this other

product, it is very clearly a win for you. But the rest of us are sitting around trying to figure out if those are real products or things that got made up. I have it on good authority that something called Dynamics 365 does exist. And there's this whole power thing as well that is not made up just to troll me, but is in fact viable businesses in their own right. But looking at this from the outside in, what are the interesting key takeaways? What are the easy on-ramps and what are the notable changes that were announced? Great question. Okay. Let me think through a couple of things. Look, we have some amazing kind of announcements over to Azure. You can read the blog post, you can walk that through, but let me give you a couple of things that I think people

should pay attention to where I think there's opportunity. Number one, you made some comments about teams, right? But if you're looking at building something in your company and so forth, or maybe even building the next thing or doing a startup, go look at Teams. it's a platform and it's a platform that is real that you can go build on you can write node to go be part of teams and it is an overall platform and i would say microsoft teams is probably the single largest developer opportunity that's new on the planet right now period period and i use slack and i've used all the different products over the years but there is something very unique with right around with teams that you have in M365 that you cannot ignore due to the growth of that overall product. And a lot of it's due to kind of the unprecedented times, but I think that as people and organizations really get used to the way that probably like a lot of people who listen to this podcast work,

that is going to be a platform where there's going to be opportunity. The second one is just developer productivity, right? You know, VS Code, you know, that is used around the planet. We are all about how do we make it easier for you to do your work, right? How do we make developers write less code? How do we make it quick, quick and easy? You know, we're showing different ways for updating even iOS apps that are built through.NET, right? We talked about all the different work around code spaces

and how do we make it just easier for developers to do what they love? But there's another aspect of it is Power Apps. Tell me more. Power Apps is an absolutely, it's about no code, right? And I know there's lots of people in the Valley

that are talking about no code and it's all the new, new thing. I'm a huge proponent of the whole no code movement. So please, you have piqued my interest. Yeah, we've been doing it for a while and we have a real product there. And it is so important, right? It's not, you know, what I love about Power Apps is one,

I remember back years ago when I was an IT admin and you wanted to have somebody line a business area to do something, right? To go build an app. I think you probably gave them a SQL server password and the SA account and said, go to town and they built it around Excel, right? Power apps, you can do Excel, you can build an app and it's going to be GDPR. It's going to be really about something that you can enable with all the controls and your developers are not going to have to build those apps because you're going to enable people all the controls. And your developers are not

going to have to build those apps because you're going to enable people within the business to go do that. And it goes beyond that, right? Developers, it isn't just about them saying, hey, great, I don't have to go build this app. You know, there's certain areas where our templating and different things that we enable through Azure, our portal that are built around this. And the developers themselves should be looking at Power Apps saying, you know what? I really don't want to write code for this. I want to spend my time writing code for something that's really going to need this. And where can I go in and make it so that we can have these no-code solutions? Because there's so many apps that need to be built around

the world that there's not enough developers for. They never will be. And I absolutely adore PowerApps. Think of it almost like our VBA in a good way that connects our cloud together. Think about it how we actually bring together, really we say M365, but that's our productivity cloud. How do we bring things together and connect that back to Azure? And so really the next one is,

is look at PowerApps, right? In this times, do you really need to build custom code for every app that you're doing? No, please don't, right? For the things that can, and you can do some really compelling applications, but that's PowerApps. You know, next look at all the things that we did about building the best really developer workstation. Go watch Hanselman's keynote, where he talked about all of the work that we're doing around Linux and really enabling all of that from GPU to our new terminal. We want Windows to be the best darn developer box that you can have.

And we want to make it so you don't spend two days setting up your dev environment. We want you to go five minutes to wow. And really, you know, that is about developer productivity again. Those are a few things that stood out to me. And they're just areas that, you know, were more even personally of things that I can go use because I don't just run an awesome advocacy team.

I run a service engineering team, right? I've been really living the kind of the move to the cloud like anybody, right? You know, I've got legacy systems that I'm bringing online and hundreds of engineers that build services for Azure as well. And, you know, I lead a dev team too. So I'm looking at these, not just as somebody at Microsoft to share to the developer community, but as a leader of a developer teams as well too.

So I've been fairly public about my love of the whole no code world. I write a sarcastic newsletter every week that people really should be subscribed to. And if they're not, it's called Last Week in AWS, slap a.com on the end and there you are. But the way I do this is with a bunch of Lambda functions, specifically at last count, 27 of them

behind four API gateways. And tying this all together with scripts was not workable. So I don't know how front-end works. I'm terrible at it, and I get more confused when I end than where I start. But I found something called Retool that got me pretty far down that path where it just hits API endpoints,

and then it's drag and drop for a web interface for internal apps, which was effectively life-changing for my perspective of these things. It feels, to be blunt, like Visual Basic for web apps, which was exactly what I needed. And as the fun cherry on top,

I did a little digging into, oh, what am I talking to when I connect to this website? It all runs on top of Azure, which is fascinating to me. It's, oh, wow, I accidentally trip over an Azure customer in the wild. It was really just a glorious thing,

start to finish. Later in time, I wound up bullying them into sponsoring a couple of things. And I'm just a fan of what this unlocks. Suddenly you don't need to go to cloud school or developer school to learn how all these things work. You can have a business idea

and put that together quickly and easily. So let me tell you a story. And this is one of my favorite ones about Power Apps. And it's from a while ago. There's a great video out there. And there's a fellow, he was at Safe Flight Auto Glass. And he worked in like the claims adjusting group. And so he saw what you'd see in many companies.

Hey, somebody goes, has a window auto glass that needs to be fixed. They have a mobile adjuster, comes and looks at it. They fill out a PDF. I think then that was uploaded somewhere where somebody turns into another PDF, the ongoing story of like just inefficiency. And there's a fellow, he was not a dev.

He worked in the claims department and he went, there's gotta be a better way. And on his own, he got two power apps and he went, wait, I can use this. Like literally I can build a mobile app where my friends that are claims adjusters can literally just bring it up on the phone and we can make it that we don't need a PDF. Like to do this PDF, we can actually bring it right into the systems. And so he did that. And the app was used around the UK. It was a great video on YouTube around this. And guess what? After that, he started building more apps and he started going and really his career totally

changed. And now he is, you know, deploying these apps and building them out for the company, for all of SafeLite. And so not only did he totally help change the company from like how they're doing tooling and how they're automating, he actually, you know, he was on Microsoft Learn. He was actually able to build more skills and invest himself. And it's been a game changer, both for him professionally and in his company. And those types of stories again and again, I don't know how you started, but I started on a Commodore 64 in my basement. And it was that discovery approach of trying something, did it work, constantly pecking at it. And this story, I tell it again and again, where here was somebody that was in a department, no IT resources, that completely

changed through Power Apps and automated something in a way that would not have been possible and did so where he was able to totally forever change his company. And there's story and story like that again and again about Power Apps that it's unbelievable. If you can mess around in Excel, you can build a mobile plus web app and you can do it around your company. Frankly, Teams, we announced Teams. You want to build apps around Teams? Great, right? Great.

Go do it through Power Apps too. And I think there is a lot there and it is a place to pay attention to. It'll be interesting to see how the messaging continues to evolve because from what you're saying, it sounds like this world of power apps is also accessible to folks who aren't already deep into the ecosystem. It sounds like a very reasonable on-ramp for folks who might be working on other platforms, who are sort of across the map, picking best-of-breed things from here

and there. It feels like it's a very easy on-ramp from what you're saying. But if you look historically at things called power, it always felt, on the other hand, like it was one of those, oh, this is only for very Microsoft-y companies. No, I mean, it's for companies. We aspire, and in a lot of ways are, we want to be the platform for every developer. And that's everybody from no code all the way to, you know, an architect that's pulling together to a data scientist, right?

You should go take a look at Power BI if you're not. You're crazy if you haven't been around Power BI. Oh, I've looked at Power BI. That's a whole separate kettle of nonsense. That's actually part of Power though as well too, right? You know, Power Apps, but that's over that Power Suite. And Power BI is so essential, right? Because of like how quickly

you can put together dashboards together and get that data into the companies. It's all of these things combined, right? Don't just look at us as Azure, something like Union, of course. You know, it's about VMs as the canonical unit for everything, right? But for us, look at us as an entire platform. Sure, there's Azure and there's our work around AI, right? But it's that combined with Teams and Microsoft 365, right?

It's a cloud. It's a cloud in the enterprise. And all of these pieces together, right, from Power BI to things that you can go do around Teams, go look at Fluent. Go look at what we talked about. Data build is another example of something that's super interesting. Very sexy demos, right? A modern kind of canvas that you can basically build next generation documents that individual items are addressable from a developer, right?

You have to look at us as Microsoft, I'd say. The thing to make sure don't be confused of is the platform is Azure, but the platform overall is our productivity cloud. It's that combined with Azure and what you can go do. And so you have to look at all these pieces together and don't feel like you got to learn it all. Go pick a small little bit. Go on Microsoft Learning. Hey, deploy a VM. Why don't you go do that through command line and go do that

on Azure for free and go, oh, wow, you can deploy Linux VMs. Yeah, it's real. We do that, right? What we do is so much more than that. And I think you want to look at us as a company holistically that is this entire set of clouds that's from to look at us as a company holistically, that is this entire set of clouds that's from productivity to our software as a service, like to what we go build there. I would also just like to point out as well that when you say, oh, go ahead and deploy a VM on Azure and do it for free. This is real free, not pretend free. We're surprised. Here's a $700 bill you weren't expecting. It is a legitimate gateway between a free account and a chargeable account. There are no billing surprises here. Microsoft Learn, no credit card

required. Get started and you'll be deploying VMs. We have a sandbox environment that you're able to do. We're not going to email you afterwards and do a sales call and say, hey, thank you for signing up for this. Can I get you to buy X, Y, and Z? No, that's about learning. And you can go do that for free. Now, if you get further along, and it's much further along in modules and certain things like that,

you may set up a trial account and so forth, but we want to get you started. We don't think you should have to pay to go and learn our platform. And we want to make that as easy as possible. And that's what my team does every day. How do we go help the community? And how do we help arm them

with great technical content and a service that really makes that easy for them to get started? We're just here to help. That I think is the probably best way to wind up wrapping this episode up. It really is a brand new Microsoft. I know I've said that before in previous years with other guests from Microsoft in various aspects, but you've successfully been able to navigate from a company that everyone, including me, hated, more or less, to one of the most admired companies out there.

And the folks that are very anti-Microsoft these days are in some ways living in the past for a lot of the reasons that they are. In fact, there's now a Linux kernel built in to Windows. An actual full-on Linux kernel means that it finally took Microsoft, of all freaking people, to bring the year of the Linux desktop here,

and that year is apparently 2020. So now people are going to have to learn a second joke. That's going to be challenging for some of them. And I understand wanting to live in the past, but it really is a whole new ball game. And it's one of the best transformation stories out there. This is going to be a case study in business school for the next hundred years. You know, we're not your grandparents, Microsoft, but you know, somebody on my team said the following. They're at Build. Today, I moderated Microsoft Dev Conference Build.

I was on Twitch. We're an app using SVLTJS for the front end. And Node.js on Azure Functions was demo. We connected it to Kubernetes and running a kubelet written in Rustlang that was compiled to Wasm. This is why I wanted to work here. Welcome to the new Microsoft. That's the company who we are. We're a company that loves developers. And thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. And folks, we're hungry for your business. We want to help. Come give us a try, and we'll be here to help you. Thank you so much, Corey, for having me. And I hope people were able to stay listening

and learn something. Oh yeah, and careful what you wish for. I will be trying to do my typical experiment of live tweeting, spinning up a VM on top of Azure. It's been a year or so since I did it. And if it works well, great, that gets tweeted. If it goes poorly, that gets tweeted too. And we all learn something from it.

So good luck. We'll see how it goes. Thank you for having us. And thanks for joining us at Build. It was a wonderful week. We're really proud of the work that we did. But the last thing I'd say is Build's still going on. As Build finished, I talked about what, eight weeks ago, we decided to build the event. Five weeks ago, we were like, you know what? When this thing's over, people aren't going to want to go home. People are going to want to be able to, well, they are at home, but they're going to want to make sure they connect with the community.

And we tried something new. We've launched it called Learn TV, microsoft.com slash learn slash TV. And our advocates, as the credits rolled for build, we're still online. We went live with kind of a fun thing. We're doing live programming on demand, Q&A, and the show must go on. And so it's like our own little TV channel, and we're learning there as well, too. So make sure you join us over there, and maybe one of these days we'll have you on as a guest as well. Uh-oh.

I think that's one of those things that would cause minor heart attacks through at least a decent portion of the organization. I don't think so. I think we'd love to have you and we'll have you on someday for sure. All right. Thanks once again for taking the time to speak with me. Jeff Sandquist, Corporate Vice President of Developer Relations at Microsoft. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Whereas if you've hated it, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts,

along with a comment listing no fewer than five Microsoft Power BI implementation ideas. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecCloud.com or wherever Fine Snark is sold. This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.