00:00 - Introduction
01:30 - Friend of the day
10:34 - Azure Static Web Apps
19:36 - The joy of writing software
22:35 - Being a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate
34:40 - Totally random question
38:51 - The story behind the tattoos of Laurent
46:12 - Closing
Introduction – 00:00
Oscar
Hey there, welcome to Betatalks, the podcast in which we talk to friends from the development community.
Rick
I am Rick
Oscar
And I am Oscar. Hey, Rick, how you doing? Been busy?
Rick
Yeah, I've been busy, obviously, with customers and doing cloud stuff, but also finally doing some relaxation as well, because as you might know, we bought a house just over a year ago. So we did everything in the house. We even completely stripped the roof and added a new one so it was a lot of work. And now finally we are...
Oscar
Enjoying it.
Rick
Yeah, enjoying it. We're almost done. We're not entirely done yet. But we now have more time for social engagements. And of course, weather is helping. So that's a good thing. And last week, my brother in law, and I discussed we're going on a weekend for a motorcycle trip to probably Belgium or Germany. We're not sure yet. Somewhere at the end of summer, so I'm really looking forward to that one because it's been a while since I've rode a bike.
Oscar
I didn't know you ride.
Rick
Yeah, I don't do it every week. But I do so occasionally and I love that feeling. So that's, that's something I'm looking forward to. And besides that, of course, we're doing stuff with the Azure talents inside of our company, giving trainings and helping customers so a lot to be done.
Oscar
Having fun.
Rick
Having fun indeed.
Friend of the day – 01:30
Oscar
Hey, Rick who is our friend of the day.
Rick
Our friend of the day is Laurent Bugnion, Laurent works as principal Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft after almost 10 years spent working for identity mine and Valorum to leading firms in Microsoft technologies. He is one of the foremost experts for XAML and C# based development. He codes in Windows WPF, Xamarin, unity and ASP dotnet. On his free time, Laurent writes for technical publications such as MSDN magazine, and his blog is on blog.galasoft.ch. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as Microsoft mix, build, Techhead, vs live, tech days, and many other international events. Prior to joining Microsoft Laurent was a Microsoft most valuable professional for Windows development from 2007 to 2017, a Microsoft Regional Director from 2013, and Xamarin, most valuable professional from 2015. He is also the author of the well known open source framework MVVM light for Windows WPF and Xamarin. Welcome, Laurent.
Oscar
Welcome.
Laurent
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. MVVM light, which is, you know, what was an amazing adventure made me meet a lot of people. It's now deprecated. But yeah, super happy to hear that name anyway. And yeah.
Rick
It's one of your accomplishments, right?
Laurent
I think it's probably one of the projects I did. Or maybe the project I did, which is best known and which kind of gave me this weird, you know, you know how Hanselman said that in our weird little world. We are kind of famous, right? It's, it's like exactly that, like, they'll probably literally 10 people in the world who know my name. And that's kind of fame for geeks. So this is super happy.
Rick
I think it might be a bit over 10.
Oscar
But the MVVM framework is adopted by Microsoft right after that.
Laurent
Yeah. so what we did is that, actually, it was it was really a success story, I think. And what happened is that the, the creators of the windows Toolkit, which is a set of tools and utilities that you can use, like an SDK, right for, to program for Windows. And that includes also, you know, MAUI and everything, right, so the whole Windows thing, contacted me some time ago, and we had realized by different means that essentially the MVVM Toolkit, which is a part of that Windows toolkit, was actually initially a fork of MVVM light, and then they had improved it, which I was really happy to hear because especially in terms of performance, for example, they had, they have a few people who are really magicians on that show, and they did great, great work. And as you might know, this toolkit is it's an open source project. It is directed by Microsoft, but it is maintained by the community. So that was a community effort since I was you know, for the past five years I've been really in Azure, I've been doing a lot less of client side development. I still dabble in blazer and other fun things but more on my side projects I would say. And so I found it was really a good idea to pass them the torch and to say alright, so this you know, do with the code first of all, anything you want. Second of all, I'm going to endorse you because I did check the code. I did check what they do it was really good. And so we officially deprecated MVVM light to the benefit of the MVVM Toolkit, which is part of the windows toolkit. So that was a good moment because I had been maintaining MVVM light for, I don't know, like 10 years, I mean, 10 years plus probably. And I think I release it in 2009. If I remember well, and after 10 years, I it was a little bit of a relief to say alright, not only I can pass it over to very competent people, there's a whole team who is going to maintain it. So it's not just on my shoulders. And also I was kind of egotistically speaking, I was kind of free to concentrate on other stuff, which, which is definitely very much the cloud these days.
Oscar
Yeah, it's definitely a responsibility to have a popular library, I think. And now, like it's been run by professionals who get even paid, I guess.
Laurent
I mean, it's still maintained by the community, but by multiple people and people who really know what they're doing so yeah, so it's a great relief, indeed.
Oscar
And it's still in your bio, so you're still famous for it.
Laurent
Well, I mean, I will always let it be in my bio, because this was a defining moment in my life, and, and not just in my professional life, but in my life in general, I met so many amazing people through that. And, you know, this is really awesome. The one of the best moment is when I was with my back then newly girlfriend, who is now my wife in an elevator, and somebody told me hey, yo, your logo, you wrote MVVP Light can I take a picture with you. And I scored some points like crazy with my girlfriend. So that was really awesome.
Rick
Yeah, of course, because then she saw that you were actually that famous guy?
Oscar
Yeah, compared with...
Laurent
Those 10 people I mentioned before?
Rick
Well, you just had the luck that one of those was, was in the elevator.
Laurent
I know. I know, I didn't even pay him anything. It was like pure chance. So I was so lucky.
Rick
Nice, nice. You probably you just mentioned that you still dabble around a bit in blazer and that kind of stuff, for your own projects. I mean, you talked about, or at least your bio talks about Xamarin and WPF. So you, you have had to had a MAUI project started right.
Laurent
MAUI, no. So that's interesting. I, I was really doing a lot of Xamarin. And at some point, I started doing a lot of automation code that's really most of what I write these days, professionally is automation code. And we can talk about that later on Azure, Azure Functions, Azure, all kinds of connectors and Logic Apps, and which is, you no code, etc., etc. And, of course, from time to time, I need a UI for those utilities. And in which case, if it's really simple, I actually use Microsoft forms, as the UI.
Oscar
It's still there, and it works
Laurent
Microsoft forms is, is great, and they actually keep improving it. So that's cool. And you can after that, if you have a simple, very simple UI, you want to just collect some information, you can then connect a Logic App to that and then kick some code in Azure function, for example, or anything. So I do a lot of that. And if I do need a UI, which is a little bit bigger, or a little bit more elaborate, then I, I tend to resort to blazer or even pure JavaScript for very, very simple things. Vue js is kind of my poison of choice. Nowadays, I don't go with more complicated frameworks, because I just don't have time to learn it. Then back then I was really vanilla JavaScript guys before, before I started doing dotnet. So it's kind of back to the roots like 30 years later or something, which is fun. But yeah, blazer is it. I mean, for me as a, you know, primarily dotnet guy with a good understanding of HTML and JavaScript. It's like the ideal sweet spot, because it allows me to use tons of new get packages, which are available anyway, and which I know already because I have been using them in WPF and other tools before. And on the other hand, if I need to dive into the HTML and the JavaScript, I can, I can do that. So you know, I'm able to do that. It's like a one man show. So yeah, so it's been good. And I've done an actually an open source project, which is called timekeeper so it's timekeeper.cloud. And everybody who wants to check it out is encouraged to do so it's a fun project where you can bring sweets and keeping track of time like you know, like the name shows, and essentially what you can do there is start one or multiple clerks and then you give a link to your guests that could be for example, something for your podcast you might want to use as a hint and then everybody sees the same time so you can say alright, so without actually telling your guests that on the podcast, you can tell them while you see I have five minutes left and you need to wrap up because of Otherwise, we're going to run along. So that's been really, really useful. We also use that internally at Microsoft to produce quite a lot of the shows we are doing, especially when we have guests. And also there is a polling tool. So this was all built on. On blazer, it's running on a static web app, which is one of my favorite services on Azure. It's powered by Azure function and by signal R and signal or isn't an amazing library when you want to do WebSockets in dotnet, or in JavaScript for that matter. And so yeah, so it's been fun to develop that on the side.
Azure Static Web Apps – 10:34
Oscar
When you mentioned Azure static web apps Rick all, he just lit up because that is favorite by far.
Laurent
This is such a fabulous project, you know, you know how back then, when you wanted to publish static content on Azure, you had to create a Blubs well a storage account, really. And then you kind of magically enabled, you know, a web server static web server by turning something in the configuration that was really cumbersome. And now you really have a full blown service plus developed by, you know, some of my most brilliant colleagues, I mean, I say that without, without hesitation, those guys are really, those people are really amazing, you know, ladies included, are really amazing. And I love the service, it's so easy to start. And it is just powerful enough that you can really use it for actually professional work production work to serve professional websites. But at the same time, it's really simple enough, and so you don't need to lose time, understanding the configuration and everything. Everything is pretty straightforward. This is really a good a good one.
Rick
And that's exactly what I love about the service. And then the fact that I mean, it completely generates the workflow, or the GitHub workflow or the Azure DevOps pipeline for you. But still, you could have your own, roll your own and completely have it be managed by yourself. Yeah. And still, it automatically triggers by static web apps. I really love the service. And yeah, just like you said.
Laurent
I think the CI CD part is probably the best part where I joke because I do a presentation about timekeeper at conferences these days. And when the last time I talked about that, I also talked about static webapp, obviously, since it's part of the whole suite, and I think what I said was like, you know, they, they force you to do the right thing, and you will like it dammit. So basically, you don't have a choice, right? It's C ICD or nothing, but that the right thing. And so it's, it's nice to see that they kind of take you by the hand and tell you well, this is how you should probably do things. Now I'm thinking that there are probably some backdoors somewhere which allow you to not do that. But really the main way to publish things is your GitHub action. Or also, if you use Azure DevOps, there are some ways to do that. There are some pipelines. And then after that, of course, it's GitHub action. So if you want to go and modify them, you can and I do that, by the way, I tend to, to send myself some messages when the deployment is successful, for example, etcetera, etcetera. So this is all stuff that you can easily add them.
Oscar
It was really an example of a service that was thought of, especially in the beginning from like primary use case, let's set up an really opinionated workflow, which works for these cases, are built on top, like as an abstraction on all kinds of other services underneath. And I believe in the future, we will see much more of these kinds of things within Cloud, where like all the elements that you need in cloud to compute and storage, I think it's been built in multiple variations. And the new services you will see are combinations of that, for specific use cases.
Laurent
I agree. It's, it's very different from what Microsoft used to do. 10 years ago, were essentially, you know, amazing tools. Right? I don't want to disparage any saying Visual Studio is still my, my tool of choice. You know, I still use principally, like mainly Visual Studio when I develop and code when I want to do some light editing of text. So I'm not a Visual Studio Code developer. And I know many of my colleagues are and kudos to them. But for me, Visual Studio is to where it's at, however, Visual Studio can do everything, including coffee, pretty much right? And, and it's like the tools that allows you to choose whatever workflow you want, and whatever, you know, extension you want, cetera. And while this is great, it's also overwhelming for new developers. And so I think that having some services like Azure static web app where you have just a couple of ways to do things, but those ways are clean and proper, and you know, security, then best practice is probably making life of beginners especially way easier. And so I personally tend to think that it's a good thing. At the same time, of course, as a, you know, seasoned developer, that means old but in other words, yeah, as a seasoned developer, I, of course, I enjoy going into Visual Studio, but the matter I mean, in the end of the day, I use probably 15%, if that of the Visual Studio capabilities, right, and the rest is there, but I never use it, maybe sometimes I don't even know it. So you have to ask yourself, at some point, when you develop new services, you know, what is most important for you? Is it to be efficient to the point and then we can always expand later, like, when I remember when I just started web app was released. They only supported GitHub, for example. Yeah, true. And then, of course, people started raising hand and say, Wait, you don't support Azure? DevOps, what's going on here? And so of course, he added it, right. And then they didn't add it because people raised hand, they added it because it was a plan all along, obviously. But as soon as GitHub, which is, you know, is as we acknowledge the most popular source repo and CI CD, you know, plays, it made sense to go there first. And then once you have it, well just release it, don't wait until you add something else, because otherwise you're never done. So this whole workflow is something new, relatively new. If you take the big picture, but this is something that I think totally makes sense.
Rick
Yeah. And then if I'm not mistaking the first iteration of Azure static web apps only supported JavaScript functions. So C#,
Laurent
That is correct. Yeah. I mean, I mean, obviously, you could always, you know, deploy, I'm sorry, deploy your dotnet function, and connect to it and run it externally. And so for our viewers who don't understand what we're talking about, essentially, it's a static web app, a static web app server, I guess you could say, well, what we mean with static is that static web apps is where you put your HTML, your images, your JavaScript code, and the server doesn't run code, it's only basically sending all that to the client, your web browser, and then the web browser is going to run all these but, there is also an API portion. And this is where it's really brilliant, in the concept is that if you want to run things on the server, you still can, but it's not informed of building your HTML, or whatever it's the JavaScript on the client will ping, you know, we'll call an API, which is on the same server. And so this is where it's nice because being on the same server means that you don't have to worry about security as much, etc. It's all those functions as those API's are built as Azure functions. In the beginning, it was just JavaScript. Now, they also support more languages, and that including, of course, dotnet. And it's really nice. Again, same workflow, right? You make a change to your API, you commit that to GitHub, or one thing I love also is how they use slots. Yes, GC slots. They call that environment, right?
Rick
That's actually what I use. When I tried to convince people to use it. They said, Would you never? Or how would you like it if your pull request automatically created an environment where the result of your pull request is deployed, so that you can click through it. And then everybody says, well, that's what we need, right.
Oscar
But that's so heavy to set up. If you would, in normal project, like with a team and stuff, setting up that I actually want to complete new environment, the moment we create a pull request.
Rick
With its own URL.
Oscar
Completely different, separated from everything. There's..
Laurent
All URLs even have their own configuration and everything. So it's been essentially this is so, so awesome. So we've had the, you know, deployment slots on App Services. For a while we've had deployment slots on Azure function, which essentially is an app service. For a while where you can do these galaxies, you can say, Alright, I'm going to deploy a totally different environment, where I have the new feature by totally different, what I mean is that it's pointing to a different database, it has a different URL, I can send that URL to my customers, they can try it out, we can even, you know, do some kind of AV testing using these kind of things. Well, in Azure static web apps, it just happens when you do a pull request. And this is so cool. Because again, it promotes the best practice, right? I mean, best practice is obviously to do a branch and then to do a pull request. While if you create the pull request. It's also going to create the test environment for you automatically. And then when you merge, it's going to also delete it for you and so you don't pay for stuff you don't you don't use right. And so no I think that's really brilliant. Yeah.
Rick
yeah, yeah, I am so glad that I found someone who's equally enthusiastic about Azure Static WebApps as I am.
The joy of writing software - 19:36
Laurent
Oh, yeah. And we do use that in production. I mean, the clearly the timekeeper, for example, even though it's a side project of mine, we use it in production at Microsoft to, to create the content that we create, and even to run some of our internal meetings. So it's funny because yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues, I'm actually in Redmond right now for an off site and it's the first time I've been Redmond for a Almost three years almost or something like that. So I'm very excited to be here. And I was talking to one of my colleagues in person. Do you remember that feeling when you talk in person to people? And, and I was telling her about the project timekeeper. And she was like, oh, yeah, I use that. I was like, oh, cool. How do you use it? And she oh, because yeah, in the in this, you know, all hands meetings, they use that to keep track of time. And that was, I didn't know you wrote it and said, well, yeah, thank you very much.
Rick
For me, that has always been the most magical feeling when I know, 17 years ago, I worked at this, or I was deployed at this insurance company, and we were building a new front end for them. I think, finding policies inside of the mainframe, I'm not really sure. But I walked the floor. And I saw more than two people having the screen opened it we built and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most magical moment where you can see end users actually using the software that you built, and mostly being happy with it. As far as I'm concerned. That's, that's magic.
Oscar
Yeah, but also, with the side projects, right? Like I, Rick sent me a screenshot this week of an extension I wrote for Azure DevOps. Awhile ago, I met a client and it's here, it's so fun to see that, like, real for yourself. And then it grows.
Laurent
You know, in the end, I think that when you write software, I mean, there are multiple motivations, right? Software, one, motivation is definitely self satisfaction where, you know, building stuff in your head, and then putting it in code and seeing it work is like, it's still I mean, again, right? I've been a developer for, you know, the best part of 30 years, and I still get this tingly feeling that, for me is the most magical moments is when I deploy an API, and I do the first call to that API with a simple get, and then I, you know, I get something saying, Hello World or whatever. And I'm like, Wow, that's amazing. You know? So this is cool. But I think eventually, right? The motivation is really to serve in to enable others. And when you have published something, which actually people use, this is so cool, right? I mean, I imagine it's, you know, same feelings. And you get when you when you write a novel, and people tell you, they read it, and they enjoyed it. You know, that must be such a great feeling. Right? So, so it's the same kind of satisfaction where you're like, Okay, so what, what is right, what is going on in my head? is actually not just for me, but also it's going to help others. And yeah, this is a fantastic feeling I say.
Being a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate – 22:35
Rick
It is, it is, I would like to get back, because we didn't really officially addressed it. The title that you have is principal Cloud Developer Advocate. Right? Could you for those listening who might not be known to that? Could you maybe explain what that means? What it is that you do?
Laurent
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, principle is like a vanity thing. Principle, it just means that basically, I'm, I got promoted, I was a senior, and then I got promoted. So we have different bands at Microsoft. And that's what it is. The Cloud Developer Advocate is way more interesting. So five years ago, I mean, I'm sure our listeners heard about a wretched guy named Scott Guthrie, who is now the executive vice president of Azure. And I remember the days when Scott Guthrie was, you know, leading dotnet, ASP dotnet, Visual Studio, these kind of things and when his blog was the only reference we had for ASP dotnet documentation. That sounds horrible, but, or maybe not the only but that is a best, by all means.
Rick
I've seen Scott Guth in a URL for so many times.
Laurent
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's like he was the developer advocate for dotnet. Right, or at least a mole. And I mean, you know, kudos to the team. The team does amazing stuff, the dotnet team, and now you have also great people who are evangelizing that, like, you know, James Montemagno. And, and, you know, C#, Fritz, Fritz, John Galloway, and many, many more. But I mean, the fact remains that Gothrie, he was always like, and he was a machine, right. Like he was always producing things and publishing like, immediately after the feature was released, you had to block posts, etc. And plus, he was always also going around the world and showing stuff up. And so when he took over Azure, he continued to do that. And of course, at some point, it doesn't scale. And so what he wanted to create with a cloud advocates, I'm a developer, but we also have Hubs people Tony and all those guys. You know, he wanted to have something a little bit like, like a little army of red shirts. Yes. People who can go around the world, talk about Azure, demonstrate Azure. And essentially what he was describing was Developer Relation, right, which is now in the terms that is pretty much established in the in the industry. But back then, a little bit less. And Developer Relation is different from evangelism from technical evangelism like we had before, in the sense that it's very hard to define those terms. And I don't want to offend anyone, by no means but I think that it's safe to say that evangelism was backed very much by, by marketing, and there was a, an aspect of, they were showing of what marketing was wanting to promote, you know, something like that doesn't diminish their technical skills in any way. But it's more in the, in the way of choosing what they were concentrating their efforts on. And for developer advocacy, I think the main difference is that we concentrate on what we know, in the communities that we know. And so most of the developer advocates, who joined Microsoft, at the time come from communities, they are community leaders or community, you know, recognized by the community as experts, and then they continue to advocate to their community. And so it means that suddenly, we have people who do Python, and we have people who do JavaScript, and we have people like me who do dotnet, which is a little bit more the traditional, you know, Microsoft, pass or, or dec, and many more, we have now, so advocates who do who talk about Azure VMs, and, and, you know, Azure, arc, and HCI, and all these technologies, which are important for totally different communities. So I think our motto is really, we try to go where people are, we try to help them in their own environment, if possible in their own language, which comes with this, you know, big set of challenges and all that, but we're working on that. And yeah, and they eventually that was kind of the foundation, if you want of the of these groups, so it's been more than five years now. It's a group, you know, fluctuates changes all the time, we just had a reorg, etc. So, but our mission is always the same, essentially, our mission is to help people I think, and help people means help them be productive, helps them understand what we are doing, it can be helping beginners to start. And so we have tons of, you know, help and different programs, etc, like the free Azure account and all that to get on Azure. But it can also be helping an expert understanding why his specific line of code doesn't work the way he thought it would, and, and going. And also, it's a two way street in the sense that since we are in touch with the community very much, we also pass the feedback back to the product groups, because, you know, those people are brilliant, some of them actually go out to conferences and speak at conferences, people like Steve Sanderson and you know, the people, Chris Elam, etc, from the from the product group from the engineers, I love these kind of talks, this is great. But they're also super busy building the tool. And so having the advocates as a frontline, you know, gathering feedback and passing this feedback back to the product group is also very precious. So it's been it’s been a fun, you know, fun adventure, I actually stopped being an MVP to do that. So it was an emotional moment. But at the same time, it's been actually, you know, super interesting job, very gratifying, very rewarding. It also shifted very much when COVID hit because we went from, you know, being away from home, at least two weeks a month, and being all around the world talking to amazing people meeting them in person to saying well, okay, so now I'm home, how can I help people from home? And the answer to that was, you know, video and other type of content. So now we are very much focused on creating content, enabling others to create content. My main job now is being executive producer of the show, which is called Learn live. You can go to aka.ms/learnlive and find more information about that, and slowly resuming in person conference at all. But basically, yeah, it's like, how can we find the best tool to help people where they are and in the in the language they love in the tech they love and the communities that they love I think.
Rick
And one of the things that I think is a big difference between the evangelists, from let's say, 10 years ago, and advocates that we have now is that the advocates can also say, Yeah, this part is still kind of crappy. And that's, that's something that you would never hear an evangelist say. But now, when feedback comes in, advocates are more easily saying, yeah, you're right, we should improve on this one. And that's why...
Laurent
I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure many of my colleagues will be happy to hear that I did hear some evangelists and you know, again, kudos to them. Say, oh, that was right. Uh, don't use it or something. But you had to be quite courageous. I mean, it was not the program, right? The program said, Oh, you have to talk about that and how awesome it is. And, and of course, some, some were actually very honest and didn't do it. But for us, I was like, I can vouch as a cloud advocate in the past five years that nobody ever told me, Oh, you shouldn't talk about that. Because it's bad, or you shouldn't talk about that, because it's not finished. Our, our way of doing things is talking about it and saying, Oh, by the way, it's not finished. Or oh, by the way, if you don't like it, let us know. And then we'll let the group know and try to improve it. And so I think honesty is very important when you when you talk to people. And it's also a mark of the you know, we keep talking about the new Microsoft and I don't want to sound like a shill. I've been the Microsoft in the Microsoft ecosystem for many, many years, I've seen three different CEOs since I was there. Or since I was active in the in the Microsoft communities. And I do believe that the current CEO does a good job at it encouraging us to be honest about what we do and, and acknowledging that in the end, everybody's human, right? I mean, we make mistakes. Some mistakes are more painful than others, especially the ones where you think that Oh, my God, why are they again, you know, doing the same thing? I won't name names. But you know, there are some things who are really you shake your head, you have to remember it's a it's a huge firm, it's a lot of people, it's a lot of divisions and all that. And there is even though we keep talking about one Microsoft, the reality is that it's like 140,000, Microsoft, right? I mean, so many, so many people are probably more now I'm not sure how many employees we have. That being said, I think honesty is super important when you do advocacy. And because honesty is the only way you can keep the trust, right? And so how are people going to continue reading and watching what you produce, if they don't trust you, if they think you're just, you know, trying to sell stuff to them. And I remember one of my very first meeting as a as an advocate in Redmond where one of our exec said, okay, so your unofficial mission is to help first and to sell last. And I always like this the sentence, because what it means is that if you help people, and if you enable people, in the end, they will buy your stuff, right. But it's not. Our goal is not to go and sell we're not salespeople. I mean, if you ask me, what is service costs, for example, most of the time, I don't actually know, I'm very privileged, because I don't have to pay for it myself. So that's definitely one part of the equation. But also, because it's not my job to sell it to you. And to tell you which plan is best, right? My job is a technical job. I'm going to show you how you make it work. I'm going to show you the possibilities. But then after that, when you need to talk about oh, wow, how do I set up? And, you know, how do I set up I can help you how much is going to cost me this is a more difficult question. And because it depends on so many things, right? What kind of subscription you have, etc. And this is where I would rather have you go and talk to, you know, to your official support wherever it is, so that you can figure it out. For me it's not my job. Yeah.
Oscar
Yeah. I think if you really like a meet more from the outside, I really think you'll see a big difference between now and five to 10 years ago. You see some professionals doing the thing, they love being completely transparent about the service, and it matches. The thing Microsoft is trying to do, I think is put more stuff out there quicker, get feedback on it. And yeah, it gives a sign of confidence of showing stuff off that isn't finished yet. Yeah, I would say kudos to that. Because you and like, for instance, Jeff Fridge, they seem enjoying the way they're doing what they're doing. And yeah, we're loving it.
Rick
True.
Laurent
Yeah, and enjoying what you're doing is an important part of the job. I mean, you know, we are blessed. Most I mean, many, many developers, in any case, are blessed with the fact that not only we do what we love, I mean, I couldn't not go write it just not something I could do. We when I'm retired, I mean to write code, I think for you know, to relax or something. But at the same time, we are paid for it. So this is great. And in my case, I'm paid to help people and to find ways to help them. So this, I mean, there is nothing better than to wake up in the morning and finding your email somebody saying, oh, I saw your talk last week. It helped me solve a problem I had. You know, that's like the best feeling. That's why we do that.
Totally random question – 34:40
Rick
Yeah, I totally agree. Oscar. Do you know what time it is?
Oscar
Is it time for a totally random question?
Rick
It is time for a totally random question. Laurent if you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would it serve?
Laurent
Wow. Oh, that is a totally random question and an interesting one. I'm a foodie like, you have no idea how much I like to eat and I need to be really careful because COVID has been a little bit dead to my waist. And I'm also a cook and my wife is an amazing cook my wife is Filipino and so I don't know if you have ever had Filipino food but it's like the definition of comfort food you know, it's fantastic food.
Rick
And probably we haven't had proper Filipino food.
Laurent
That is possible. Yeah, I mean, who knows? Definitely come to my house next time you're in Switzerland we will change that. So if I had the restaurant so first of all, let me preface that by saying that I've had people in my family who had restaurant and it's like the most one of the most difficult jobs in the world because of the working hours of the, the difficulty to satisfy customers etc., etc. It's also gratifying when you when you please them but it's really hard so I would never have a restaurant. I love to cook but I yeah, when you start charging for it is when really trouble starts. Nonetheless, I mean, maybe I would try to promote the food from my state, my home state in Switzerland, we have 26 states. And each state has its own identity, its own culture, you know, its own dialect sometimes and, and its own food. And so I come from, from a state called Vo of Heartland in German, which is at lake level in North Lake Geneva, right. Don't offend me by saying Lake Geneva, Lake Lemon. Cause it doesn't belong just to Geneva. Geneva has like a small super small portion of the lake. So the state I come from has the biggest part of the lake. And the main city there is called Lausanne DC where I was born and raised. And we have amazing food there. It's mostly farmer food I would say it's a lot of sausages a lot of you know like dishes where you have butter and cream pretty rich pretty delicious. Great especially in winter or in or in autumn where the only the only relief you have from the weather is always there is a good meal on the table. And there are a few good restaurants from that state you know, in Switzerland, but I don't think there are some worldwide so if I had enough power and money I would probably open a chain of those. And make sure that these have really quality farmer food left and right and make people happy these ways that could be fun. Yeah.
Oscar
I'm so hungry right now.
Rick
He was drooling opposite of me. Well, it does it does sound good. It does sound a bit to be honest. Like I'm not entirely sure if this was the case but it does sound a bit like Dutch winter food that we have here with hutspot that's a...
Laurent
You know, when you when you go north the food changes, right and so you go from a very happy food Mediterranean food is a happy food right? You have a lot of olive oil, this is like certainly in your in your plate and, and a lot of you know grilled fish, which is like lean and delicious and flavor and herbs right like thyme and rosemary and all that. And then you move to the north and things change a bit because in the north you have six months of bad weather you have to cook.
Oscar
Come in wet and you need some food that hugs you.
Laurent
Exactly, exactly, exactly. That is so true. And one of the some of the best food I've had is in Iceland, for example, whereas they don't have a lot of, of resources in terms of food, like vegetables have to be grown in a greenhouse, etc, etc. But oh my god, if you have an Icelandic fish soup, you know that like wow, okay, it's the weather can be crappy outside, but you don't care. You have your Icelandic dish.
The story behind the tattoos of Laurent – 38:51
Rick
That sounds about right. One other thing that I would like to touch upon briefly if that's okay is if we, if we look you up online, then you have this. I mean, pretty outstanding profile picture that comes back on multiple occasions, where you very proudly show off your tattooed wrists or forearms? There's bound to be a story behind those.
Laurent
Yeah, very Yeah. How much time do you have? No, I'm a I'm a guy who believes in symbols very much. So first of all, let me start by saying I only started getting tattoos when I was 45. I think so relatively late in life and there is a whole story to that as well, but it's not the place for that. But essentially, symbolism and metal and all kinds of you know very, how should I say first bounds rituals, right, like, like heavy metal is something which is like bound to the earth you know, and etcetera have been very important for me my whole life I started listening to metal when I was 14 or 13. My very first audio tape was peace of mind Nadan which was released in '83. Two I was 12. I don't think I bought it when it came out immediately, but probably when I was 13. And since then I never stopped listening to metal and other things like I'm in Seattle, so of course, I mean, I'm in Seattle right now I come to Seattle a lot, I listen to grunge of course, etcetera, etcetera. So, so metal is like very wide. So, you know, not just one thing. And so, of course, getting tattooed was also a way for me to continue my exploration of that world, I would say, and I work with a with a really good tattoo artist. And so the interesting thing is that in Switzerland, you have multiple cultures and multiple languages. So I come from the western side, like I was saying before, where my, my main language is French, but I live in Zurich, which is Germanic, right, it's Alamanni kind. And the reason why we have those languages in, in Switzerland is goes back to, you know, the Roman times where a lot of Germans at the time came down from the north, they were hungry and miserable because of famine. And basically, they came down and they went all the way to Rome, right, as it goes into these egos, and all the way to do you know, pretty far south, right? They went to Spain, etc. And of course, they came to Switzerland as well. And in Switzerland, you have the people called the Elbeds, who are actually Celts. So there is a huge Celtic civilization in Switzerland, they held it. And the Germans basically pushed them west until they couldn't anymore because there was a big river, which is still there. This is the Sarine in French or the Saane in German. And this is still today's delimitation of the languages. So you know, west of the Sarine , we speak French east, basically German. And that goes all the way back to 400. AD, right. So when I moved to Zurich, I left behind, well, no, I don't want to say I left behind, I took it with me. But I also changed culture very much. And even though it's the same country, we you know, have the same some of the aspects of the culture are the same but a lot is different. And really, in for example, my place is a wine culture right from the south. And, and Zurich is a beer culture, obviously, it's a different, like, the base beverage that you drink at parties is different. So this is one example. Of course the language is different.
Rick
But that's quite a big difference already.
Laurent
That's a big difference. Definitely. And so I don't know at some point, I started listening to metal, made in Switzerland, a band called elevate, I really liked them. They do kind of death metal, but we also Celtic instruments. Things like the whole the Goldie, which is a type of violin, or you know, some flutes, and some bagpipes and all kinds of things. And listening to those sounds can kind of walk something into me like I was like, wow, that is amazing. I knew it. I knew this. I knew the sculpture, but I didn't realize how deep it went into my heart. And that's what I realized that, okay, I'm living in a place, which is not my culture, I am Celtic, Celt, you know, in, in origin, of course, with all the changes and, you know, that leads through the world, but my family has been bound to the same place since at least 1200. We know, because we found records. And before that they didn't keep record. So I, I've always been in the same place, my family has always been in the same place. And so yeah, and that kind of wanting to indicate that. And so most of the tattoos I have are Celtic, I have a tree of life on my shoulder, I have triquetra, which is one you can see in my profile picture on my wrist, I also have a skull on my wrist, because the skull is a good reminder that when we die, all that is left behind is a skull. And when you look at the skull, you can not immediately know if the person was a man or a woman if they were, you know, black, red, brown, white, green, or whatever color they are. And essentially, in the end, we're all equal in death, right? So it's a good reminder of that, you know, trying to remember that we should also be equal in life, etc, etc. So a lot of Celtic stuff. I also have a big Asian dragon on my shoulder because I also have some ties to Asia, one of them being my amazing wife, like I mentioned before. And so yes, all that is, you know, trying to, I guess new tattoos or for yourself and then after that you also show them off to your friends. But I would say for me, it's really like, when I look at my wrist I'm like, oh, yeah, that's my identity and you travel so much. You talk to so many different people from different, different culture. It's also interesting and an important thing to remember your own identity and where you come from. And I'm not a nationalist in any way, my passport doesn't matter much to me, but the Celtic culture kind of does. And I'm very proud actually, that I'm, I'm a I'm a Celt of the East, but when I talk to somebody in Wales are in other places, this is the same underlying culture. And there are some symbols, like the treaty law, for example, which are all over the place because of that culture. And this is a Yeah, it's a it's a good reminder. I think.
Oscar
So there was a lot behind that question, Rick.
Rick
No, but this was so cool.
Oscar
No, no.
Rick
The cool thing is that, I mean, there's different reasons for getting tattoos and the fact that you have such a well thought out idea about your actual own identity and your heritage, and everything behind it only makes the tattoos more valuable as far as I'm concerned. So it's nice to hear that one.
Oscar
It's great to, to have an episode also to get to know one of our friends from the community, right? And to know not only the technology we're all passionate about, but something behind the story. Is there...
Laurent
I'm so happy. I'm so happy, I have a chance to tell that story. So thank you so much.
Rick
Yeah, no problem.
Closing – 46:12
Oscar
Is there anything that we completely missed? Or you want to add on? You know, in the time that we still have?
Laurent
My wife tells me oh, wow, you really love to talk? Right? I can hear her laughing right now, if she's listening. So because it's true, I mean, you know, there is nothing better than to talk for a whole evening with friends. So definitely, yes, there is obviously more things to say. I think the main thing I'm really proud of right now is and to go back to work is the show and producing learn live, we try to do the best job of actually helping people to learn. And if people go there and check it out, and also pass me feedback, what would you like to see what can we do better? How can we it's a live show. It's an interactive show. So if you go on the show at the time of streaming, you will actually be able to ask questions from the presenters. And I don't know many shows who do that a lot these days is pre recorded. And you know, it's good content, but you cannot ask the question directly, right. Another thing of live is that it's a 90 minute show, typically. So it's quite long. If you compare that to a 30 second Tik Tok or a two minute video on Twitter. And again, kudos to people who do that there is definitely a need for that. But I believe there is also a need for long, long form content. And this is what we do. Also things are of course, all the conference we do. So now we are in a place where we are starting to think about Ignite and other things. And I definitely cannot say anything about that, as you understand right now, this is still very early. But basically, we just finished build and those first party conferences, like we call them are a huge work and having you know people participating to that is a big reward. So again, right, let us know what we did bad let us know what we can do better. It's many, many teams and many people behind that. And sometimes we take decisions, which we shouldn't have. And we'd love to hear more about that. So let us know. Feedback is super important. People can find me on Twitter, it's @LBugnion. And if you send an email to my Twitter lbugnion@microsoft.com, you will also reach me so feel free to send me an email. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, I love feedback.
Oscar
Cool, we'll definitely link some, some of that content in the show notes.
Laurent
Thank you.
Rick
Yeah. So it's been awesome to have the time to both talk, tech, but also get to know you a little bit better. So thank you so much for being here.
Laurent
My pleasure.
Oscar
Yeah. Thank you for being our guest.
Rick
Thank you for listening to Betatalks the podcast, we publish a new episode every two weeks.
Oscar
You can find us on all the major streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes.
Rick
See you next time.
Oscar
Bye.
01:30 - Friend of the day
10:34 - Azure Static Web Apps
19:36 - The joy of writing software
22:35 - Being a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate
34:40 - Totally random question
38:51 - The story behind the tattoos of Laurent
46:12 - Closing
Introduction – 00:00
Oscar
Hey there, welcome to Betatalks, the podcast in which we talk to friends from the development community.
Rick
I am Rick
Oscar
And I am Oscar. Hey, Rick, how you doing? Been busy?
Rick
Yeah, I've been busy, obviously, with customers and doing cloud stuff, but also finally doing some relaxation as well, because as you might know, we bought a house just over a year ago. So we did everything in the house. We even completely stripped the roof and added a new one so it was a lot of work. And now finally we are...
Oscar
Enjoying it.
Rick
Yeah, enjoying it. We're almost done. We're not entirely done yet. But we now have more time for social engagements. And of course, weather is helping. So that's a good thing. And last week, my brother in law, and I discussed we're going on a weekend for a motorcycle trip to probably Belgium or Germany. We're not sure yet. Somewhere at the end of summer, so I'm really looking forward to that one because it's been a while since I've rode a bike.
Oscar
I didn't know you ride.
Rick
Yeah, I don't do it every week. But I do so occasionally and I love that feeling. So that's, that's something I'm looking forward to. And besides that, of course, we're doing stuff with the Azure talents inside of our company, giving trainings and helping customers so a lot to be done.
Oscar
Having fun.
Rick
Having fun indeed.
Friend of the day – 01:30
Oscar
Hey, Rick who is our friend of the day.
Rick
Our friend of the day is Laurent Bugnion, Laurent works as principal Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft after almost 10 years spent working for identity mine and Valorum to leading firms in Microsoft technologies. He is one of the foremost experts for XAML and C# based development. He codes in Windows WPF, Xamarin, unity and ASP dotnet. On his free time, Laurent writes for technical publications such as MSDN magazine, and his blog is on blog.galasoft.ch. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as Microsoft mix, build, Techhead, vs live, tech days, and many other international events. Prior to joining Microsoft Laurent was a Microsoft most valuable professional for Windows development from 2007 to 2017, a Microsoft Regional Director from 2013, and Xamarin, most valuable professional from 2015. He is also the author of the well known open source framework MVVM light for Windows WPF and Xamarin. Welcome, Laurent.
Oscar
Welcome.
Laurent
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. MVVM light, which is, you know, what was an amazing adventure made me meet a lot of people. It's now deprecated. But yeah, super happy to hear that name anyway. And yeah.
Rick
It's one of your accomplishments, right?
Laurent
I think it's probably one of the projects I did. Or maybe the project I did, which is best known and which kind of gave me this weird, you know, you know how Hanselman said that in our weird little world. We are kind of famous, right? It's, it's like exactly that, like, they'll probably literally 10 people in the world who know my name. And that's kind of fame for geeks. So this is super happy.
Rick
I think it might be a bit over 10.
Oscar
But the MVVM framework is adopted by Microsoft right after that.
Laurent
Yeah. so what we did is that, actually, it was it was really a success story, I think. And what happened is that the, the creators of the windows Toolkit, which is a set of tools and utilities that you can use, like an SDK, right for, to program for Windows. And that includes also, you know, MAUI and everything, right, so the whole Windows thing, contacted me some time ago, and we had realized by different means that essentially the MVVM Toolkit, which is a part of that Windows toolkit, was actually initially a fork of MVVM light, and then they had improved it, which I was really happy to hear because especially in terms of performance, for example, they had, they have a few people who are really magicians on that show, and they did great, great work. And as you might know, this toolkit is it's an open source project. It is directed by Microsoft, but it is maintained by the community. So that was a community effort since I was you know, for the past five years I've been really in Azure, I've been doing a lot less of client side development. I still dabble in blazer and other fun things but more on my side projects I would say. And so I found it was really a good idea to pass them the torch and to say alright, so this you know, do with the code first of all, anything you want. Second of all, I'm going to endorse you because I did check the code. I did check what they do it was really good. And so we officially deprecated MVVM light to the benefit of the MVVM Toolkit, which is part of the windows toolkit. So that was a good moment because I had been maintaining MVVM light for, I don't know, like 10 years, I mean, 10 years plus probably. And I think I release it in 2009. If I remember well, and after 10 years, I it was a little bit of a relief to say alright, not only I can pass it over to very competent people, there's a whole team who is going to maintain it. So it's not just on my shoulders. And also I was kind of egotistically speaking, I was kind of free to concentrate on other stuff, which, which is definitely very much the cloud these days.
Oscar
Yeah, it's definitely a responsibility to have a popular library, I think. And now, like it's been run by professionals who get even paid, I guess.
Laurent
I mean, it's still maintained by the community, but by multiple people and people who really know what they're doing so yeah, so it's a great relief, indeed.
Oscar
And it's still in your bio, so you're still famous for it.
Laurent
Well, I mean, I will always let it be in my bio, because this was a defining moment in my life, and, and not just in my professional life, but in my life in general, I met so many amazing people through that. And, you know, this is really awesome. The one of the best moment is when I was with my back then newly girlfriend, who is now my wife in an elevator, and somebody told me hey, yo, your logo, you wrote MVVP Light can I take a picture with you. And I scored some points like crazy with my girlfriend. So that was really awesome.
Rick
Yeah, of course, because then she saw that you were actually that famous guy?
Oscar
Yeah, compared with...
Laurent
Those 10 people I mentioned before?
Rick
Well, you just had the luck that one of those was, was in the elevator.
Laurent
I know. I know, I didn't even pay him anything. It was like pure chance. So I was so lucky.
Rick
Nice, nice. You probably you just mentioned that you still dabble around a bit in blazer and that kind of stuff, for your own projects. I mean, you talked about, or at least your bio talks about Xamarin and WPF. So you, you have had to had a MAUI project started right.
Laurent
MAUI, no. So that's interesting. I, I was really doing a lot of Xamarin. And at some point, I started doing a lot of automation code that's really most of what I write these days, professionally is automation code. And we can talk about that later on Azure, Azure Functions, Azure, all kinds of connectors and Logic Apps, and which is, you no code, etc., etc. And, of course, from time to time, I need a UI for those utilities. And in which case, if it's really simple, I actually use Microsoft forms, as the UI.
Oscar
It's still there, and it works
Laurent
Microsoft forms is, is great, and they actually keep improving it. So that's cool. And you can after that, if you have a simple, very simple UI, you want to just collect some information, you can then connect a Logic App to that and then kick some code in Azure function, for example, or anything. So I do a lot of that. And if I do need a UI, which is a little bit bigger, or a little bit more elaborate, then I, I tend to resort to blazer or even pure JavaScript for very, very simple things. Vue js is kind of my poison of choice. Nowadays, I don't go with more complicated frameworks, because I just don't have time to learn it. Then back then I was really vanilla JavaScript guys before, before I started doing dotnet. So it's kind of back to the roots like 30 years later or something, which is fun. But yeah, blazer is it. I mean, for me as a, you know, primarily dotnet guy with a good understanding of HTML and JavaScript. It's like the ideal sweet spot, because it allows me to use tons of new get packages, which are available anyway, and which I know already because I have been using them in WPF and other tools before. And on the other hand, if I need to dive into the HTML and the JavaScript, I can, I can do that. So you know, I'm able to do that. It's like a one man show. So yeah, so it's been good. And I've done an actually an open source project, which is called timekeeper so it's timekeeper.cloud. And everybody who wants to check it out is encouraged to do so it's a fun project where you can bring sweets and keeping track of time like you know, like the name shows, and essentially what you can do there is start one or multiple clerks and then you give a link to your guests that could be for example, something for your podcast you might want to use as a hint and then everybody sees the same time so you can say alright, so without actually telling your guests that on the podcast, you can tell them while you see I have five minutes left and you need to wrap up because of Otherwise, we're going to run along. So that's been really, really useful. We also use that internally at Microsoft to produce quite a lot of the shows we are doing, especially when we have guests. And also there is a polling tool. So this was all built on. On blazer, it's running on a static web app, which is one of my favorite services on Azure. It's powered by Azure function and by signal R and signal or isn't an amazing library when you want to do WebSockets in dotnet, or in JavaScript for that matter. And so yeah, so it's been fun to develop that on the side.
Azure Static Web Apps – 10:34
Oscar
When you mentioned Azure static web apps Rick all, he just lit up because that is favorite by far.
Laurent
This is such a fabulous project, you know, you know how back then, when you wanted to publish static content on Azure, you had to create a Blubs well a storage account, really. And then you kind of magically enabled, you know, a web server static web server by turning something in the configuration that was really cumbersome. And now you really have a full blown service plus developed by, you know, some of my most brilliant colleagues, I mean, I say that without, without hesitation, those guys are really, those people are really amazing, you know, ladies included, are really amazing. And I love the service, it's so easy to start. And it is just powerful enough that you can really use it for actually professional work production work to serve professional websites. But at the same time, it's really simple enough, and so you don't need to lose time, understanding the configuration and everything. Everything is pretty straightforward. This is really a good a good one.
Rick
And that's exactly what I love about the service. And then the fact that I mean, it completely generates the workflow, or the GitHub workflow or the Azure DevOps pipeline for you. But still, you could have your own, roll your own and completely have it be managed by yourself. Yeah. And still, it automatically triggers by static web apps. I really love the service. And yeah, just like you said.
Laurent
I think the CI CD part is probably the best part where I joke because I do a presentation about timekeeper at conferences these days. And when the last time I talked about that, I also talked about static webapp, obviously, since it's part of the whole suite, and I think what I said was like, you know, they, they force you to do the right thing, and you will like it dammit. So basically, you don't have a choice, right? It's C ICD or nothing, but that the right thing. And so it's, it's nice to see that they kind of take you by the hand and tell you well, this is how you should probably do things. Now I'm thinking that there are probably some backdoors somewhere which allow you to not do that. But really the main way to publish things is your GitHub action. Or also, if you use Azure DevOps, there are some ways to do that. There are some pipelines. And then after that, of course, it's GitHub action. So if you want to go and modify them, you can and I do that, by the way, I tend to, to send myself some messages when the deployment is successful, for example, etcetera, etcetera. So this is all stuff that you can easily add them.
Oscar
It was really an example of a service that was thought of, especially in the beginning from like primary use case, let's set up an really opinionated workflow, which works for these cases, are built on top, like as an abstraction on all kinds of other services underneath. And I believe in the future, we will see much more of these kinds of things within Cloud, where like all the elements that you need in cloud to compute and storage, I think it's been built in multiple variations. And the new services you will see are combinations of that, for specific use cases.
Laurent
I agree. It's, it's very different from what Microsoft used to do. 10 years ago, were essentially, you know, amazing tools. Right? I don't want to disparage any saying Visual Studio is still my, my tool of choice. You know, I still use principally, like mainly Visual Studio when I develop and code when I want to do some light editing of text. So I'm not a Visual Studio Code developer. And I know many of my colleagues are and kudos to them. But for me, Visual Studio is to where it's at, however, Visual Studio can do everything, including coffee, pretty much right? And, and it's like the tools that allows you to choose whatever workflow you want, and whatever, you know, extension you want, cetera. And while this is great, it's also overwhelming for new developers. And so I think that having some services like Azure static web app where you have just a couple of ways to do things, but those ways are clean and proper, and you know, security, then best practice is probably making life of beginners especially way easier. And so I personally tend to think that it's a good thing. At the same time, of course, as a, you know, seasoned developer, that means old but in other words, yeah, as a seasoned developer, I, of course, I enjoy going into Visual Studio, but the matter I mean, in the end of the day, I use probably 15%, if that of the Visual Studio capabilities, right, and the rest is there, but I never use it, maybe sometimes I don't even know it. So you have to ask yourself, at some point, when you develop new services, you know, what is most important for you? Is it to be efficient to the point and then we can always expand later, like, when I remember when I just started web app was released. They only supported GitHub, for example. Yeah, true. And then, of course, people started raising hand and say, Wait, you don't support Azure? DevOps, what's going on here? And so of course, he added it, right. And then they didn't add it because people raised hand, they added it because it was a plan all along, obviously. But as soon as GitHub, which is, you know, is as we acknowledge the most popular source repo and CI CD, you know, plays, it made sense to go there first. And then once you have it, well just release it, don't wait until you add something else, because otherwise you're never done. So this whole workflow is something new, relatively new. If you take the big picture, but this is something that I think totally makes sense.
Rick
Yeah. And then if I'm not mistaking the first iteration of Azure static web apps only supported JavaScript functions. So C#,
Laurent
That is correct. Yeah. I mean, I mean, obviously, you could always, you know, deploy, I'm sorry, deploy your dotnet function, and connect to it and run it externally. And so for our viewers who don't understand what we're talking about, essentially, it's a static web app, a static web app server, I guess you could say, well, what we mean with static is that static web apps is where you put your HTML, your images, your JavaScript code, and the server doesn't run code, it's only basically sending all that to the client, your web browser, and then the web browser is going to run all these but, there is also an API portion. And this is where it's really brilliant, in the concept is that if you want to run things on the server, you still can, but it's not informed of building your HTML, or whatever it's the JavaScript on the client will ping, you know, we'll call an API, which is on the same server. And so this is where it's nice because being on the same server means that you don't have to worry about security as much, etc. It's all those functions as those API's are built as Azure functions. In the beginning, it was just JavaScript. Now, they also support more languages, and that including, of course, dotnet. And it's really nice. Again, same workflow, right? You make a change to your API, you commit that to GitHub, or one thing I love also is how they use slots. Yes, GC slots. They call that environment, right?
Rick
That's actually what I use. When I tried to convince people to use it. They said, Would you never? Or how would you like it if your pull request automatically created an environment where the result of your pull request is deployed, so that you can click through it. And then everybody says, well, that's what we need, right.
Oscar
But that's so heavy to set up. If you would, in normal project, like with a team and stuff, setting up that I actually want to complete new environment, the moment we create a pull request.
Rick
With its own URL.
Oscar
Completely different, separated from everything. There's..
Laurent
All URLs even have their own configuration and everything. So it's been essentially this is so, so awesome. So we've had the, you know, deployment slots on App Services. For a while we've had deployment slots on Azure function, which essentially is an app service. For a while where you can do these galaxies, you can say, Alright, I'm going to deploy a totally different environment, where I have the new feature by totally different, what I mean is that it's pointing to a different database, it has a different URL, I can send that URL to my customers, they can try it out, we can even, you know, do some kind of AV testing using these kind of things. Well, in Azure static web apps, it just happens when you do a pull request. And this is so cool. Because again, it promotes the best practice, right? I mean, best practice is obviously to do a branch and then to do a pull request. While if you create the pull request. It's also going to create the test environment for you automatically. And then when you merge, it's going to also delete it for you and so you don't pay for stuff you don't you don't use right. And so no I think that's really brilliant. Yeah.
Rick
yeah, yeah, I am so glad that I found someone who's equally enthusiastic about Azure Static WebApps as I am.
The joy of writing software - 19:36
Laurent
Oh, yeah. And we do use that in production. I mean, the clearly the timekeeper, for example, even though it's a side project of mine, we use it in production at Microsoft to, to create the content that we create, and even to run some of our internal meetings. So it's funny because yesterday I was talking to one of my colleagues, I'm actually in Redmond right now for an off site and it's the first time I've been Redmond for a Almost three years almost or something like that. So I'm very excited to be here. And I was talking to one of my colleagues in person. Do you remember that feeling when you talk in person to people? And, and I was telling her about the project timekeeper. And she was like, oh, yeah, I use that. I was like, oh, cool. How do you use it? And she oh, because yeah, in the in this, you know, all hands meetings, they use that to keep track of time. And that was, I didn't know you wrote it and said, well, yeah, thank you very much.
Rick
For me, that has always been the most magical feeling when I know, 17 years ago, I worked at this, or I was deployed at this insurance company, and we were building a new front end for them. I think, finding policies inside of the mainframe, I'm not really sure. But I walked the floor. And I saw more than two people having the screen opened it we built and as far as I'm concerned, that's the most magical moment where you can see end users actually using the software that you built, and mostly being happy with it. As far as I'm concerned. That's, that's magic.
Oscar
Yeah, but also, with the side projects, right? Like I, Rick sent me a screenshot this week of an extension I wrote for Azure DevOps. Awhile ago, I met a client and it's here, it's so fun to see that, like, real for yourself. And then it grows.
Laurent
You know, in the end, I think that when you write software, I mean, there are multiple motivations, right? Software, one, motivation is definitely self satisfaction where, you know, building stuff in your head, and then putting it in code and seeing it work is like, it's still I mean, again, right? I've been a developer for, you know, the best part of 30 years, and I still get this tingly feeling that, for me is the most magical moments is when I deploy an API, and I do the first call to that API with a simple get, and then I, you know, I get something saying, Hello World or whatever. And I'm like, Wow, that's amazing. You know? So this is cool. But I think eventually, right? The motivation is really to serve in to enable others. And when you have published something, which actually people use, this is so cool, right? I mean, I imagine it's, you know, same feelings. And you get when you when you write a novel, and people tell you, they read it, and they enjoyed it. You know, that must be such a great feeling. Right? So, so it's the same kind of satisfaction where you're like, Okay, so what, what is right, what is going on in my head? is actually not just for me, but also it's going to help others. And yeah, this is a fantastic feeling I say.
Being a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate – 22:35
Rick
It is, it is, I would like to get back, because we didn't really officially addressed it. The title that you have is principal Cloud Developer Advocate. Right? Could you for those listening who might not be known to that? Could you maybe explain what that means? What it is that you do?
Laurent
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, principle is like a vanity thing. Principle, it just means that basically, I'm, I got promoted, I was a senior, and then I got promoted. So we have different bands at Microsoft. And that's what it is. The Cloud Developer Advocate is way more interesting. So five years ago, I mean, I'm sure our listeners heard about a wretched guy named Scott Guthrie, who is now the executive vice president of Azure. And I remember the days when Scott Guthrie was, you know, leading dotnet, ASP dotnet, Visual Studio, these kind of things and when his blog was the only reference we had for ASP dotnet documentation. That sounds horrible, but, or maybe not the only but that is a best, by all means.
Rick
I've seen Scott Guth in a URL for so many times.
Laurent
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's like he was the developer advocate for dotnet. Right, or at least a mole. And I mean, you know, kudos to the team. The team does amazing stuff, the dotnet team, and now you have also great people who are evangelizing that, like, you know, James Montemagno. And, and, you know, C#, Fritz, Fritz, John Galloway, and many, many more. But I mean, the fact remains that Gothrie, he was always like, and he was a machine, right. Like he was always producing things and publishing like, immediately after the feature was released, you had to block posts, etc. And plus, he was always also going around the world and showing stuff up. And so when he took over Azure, he continued to do that. And of course, at some point, it doesn't scale. And so what he wanted to create with a cloud advocates, I'm a developer, but we also have Hubs people Tony and all those guys. You know, he wanted to have something a little bit like, like a little army of red shirts. Yes. People who can go around the world, talk about Azure, demonstrate Azure. And essentially what he was describing was Developer Relation, right, which is now in the terms that is pretty much established in the in the industry. But back then, a little bit less. And Developer Relation is different from evangelism from technical evangelism like we had before, in the sense that it's very hard to define those terms. And I don't want to offend anyone, by no means but I think that it's safe to say that evangelism was backed very much by, by marketing, and there was a, an aspect of, they were showing of what marketing was wanting to promote, you know, something like that doesn't diminish their technical skills in any way. But it's more in the, in the way of choosing what they were concentrating their efforts on. And for developer advocacy, I think the main difference is that we concentrate on what we know, in the communities that we know. And so most of the developer advocates, who joined Microsoft, at the time come from communities, they are community leaders or community, you know, recognized by the community as experts, and then they continue to advocate to their community. And so it means that suddenly, we have people who do Python, and we have people who do JavaScript, and we have people like me who do dotnet, which is a little bit more the traditional, you know, Microsoft, pass or, or dec, and many more, we have now, so advocates who do who talk about Azure VMs, and, and, you know, Azure, arc, and HCI, and all these technologies, which are important for totally different communities. So I think our motto is really, we try to go where people are, we try to help them in their own environment, if possible in their own language, which comes with this, you know, big set of challenges and all that, but we're working on that. And yeah, and they eventually that was kind of the foundation, if you want of the of these groups, so it's been more than five years now. It's a group, you know, fluctuates changes all the time, we just had a reorg, etc. So, but our mission is always the same, essentially, our mission is to help people I think, and help people means help them be productive, helps them understand what we are doing, it can be helping beginners to start. And so we have tons of, you know, help and different programs, etc, like the free Azure account and all that to get on Azure. But it can also be helping an expert understanding why his specific line of code doesn't work the way he thought it would, and, and going. And also, it's a two way street in the sense that since we are in touch with the community very much, we also pass the feedback back to the product groups, because, you know, those people are brilliant, some of them actually go out to conferences and speak at conferences, people like Steve Sanderson and you know, the people, Chris Elam, etc, from the from the product group from the engineers, I love these kind of talks, this is great. But they're also super busy building the tool. And so having the advocates as a frontline, you know, gathering feedback and passing this feedback back to the product group is also very precious. So it's been it’s been a fun, you know, fun adventure, I actually stopped being an MVP to do that. So it was an emotional moment. But at the same time, it's been actually, you know, super interesting job, very gratifying, very rewarding. It also shifted very much when COVID hit because we went from, you know, being away from home, at least two weeks a month, and being all around the world talking to amazing people meeting them in person to saying well, okay, so now I'm home, how can I help people from home? And the answer to that was, you know, video and other type of content. So now we are very much focused on creating content, enabling others to create content. My main job now is being executive producer of the show, which is called Learn live. You can go to aka.ms/learnlive and find more information about that, and slowly resuming in person conference at all. But basically, yeah, it's like, how can we find the best tool to help people where they are and in the in the language they love in the tech they love and the communities that they love I think.
Rick
And one of the things that I think is a big difference between the evangelists, from let's say, 10 years ago, and advocates that we have now is that the advocates can also say, Yeah, this part is still kind of crappy. And that's, that's something that you would never hear an evangelist say. But now, when feedback comes in, advocates are more easily saying, yeah, you're right, we should improve on this one. And that's why...
Laurent
I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure many of my colleagues will be happy to hear that I did hear some evangelists and you know, again, kudos to them. Say, oh, that was right. Uh, don't use it or something. But you had to be quite courageous. I mean, it was not the program, right? The program said, Oh, you have to talk about that and how awesome it is. And, and of course, some, some were actually very honest and didn't do it. But for us, I was like, I can vouch as a cloud advocate in the past five years that nobody ever told me, Oh, you shouldn't talk about that. Because it's bad, or you shouldn't talk about that, because it's not finished. Our, our way of doing things is talking about it and saying, Oh, by the way, it's not finished. Or oh, by the way, if you don't like it, let us know. And then we'll let the group know and try to improve it. And so I think honesty is very important when you when you talk to people. And it's also a mark of the you know, we keep talking about the new Microsoft and I don't want to sound like a shill. I've been the Microsoft in the Microsoft ecosystem for many, many years, I've seen three different CEOs since I was there. Or since I was active in the in the Microsoft communities. And I do believe that the current CEO does a good job at it encouraging us to be honest about what we do and, and acknowledging that in the end, everybody's human, right? I mean, we make mistakes. Some mistakes are more painful than others, especially the ones where you think that Oh, my God, why are they again, you know, doing the same thing? I won't name names. But you know, there are some things who are really you shake your head, you have to remember it's a it's a huge firm, it's a lot of people, it's a lot of divisions and all that. And there is even though we keep talking about one Microsoft, the reality is that it's like 140,000, Microsoft, right? I mean, so many, so many people are probably more now I'm not sure how many employees we have. That being said, I think honesty is super important when you do advocacy. And because honesty is the only way you can keep the trust, right? And so how are people going to continue reading and watching what you produce, if they don't trust you, if they think you're just, you know, trying to sell stuff to them. And I remember one of my very first meeting as a as an advocate in Redmond where one of our exec said, okay, so your unofficial mission is to help first and to sell last. And I always like this the sentence, because what it means is that if you help people, and if you enable people, in the end, they will buy your stuff, right. But it's not. Our goal is not to go and sell we're not salespeople. I mean, if you ask me, what is service costs, for example, most of the time, I don't actually know, I'm very privileged, because I don't have to pay for it myself. So that's definitely one part of the equation. But also, because it's not my job to sell it to you. And to tell you which plan is best, right? My job is a technical job. I'm going to show you how you make it work. I'm going to show you the possibilities. But then after that, when you need to talk about oh, wow, how do I set up? And, you know, how do I set up I can help you how much is going to cost me this is a more difficult question. And because it depends on so many things, right? What kind of subscription you have, etc. And this is where I would rather have you go and talk to, you know, to your official support wherever it is, so that you can figure it out. For me it's not my job. Yeah.
Oscar
Yeah. I think if you really like a meet more from the outside, I really think you'll see a big difference between now and five to 10 years ago. You see some professionals doing the thing, they love being completely transparent about the service, and it matches. The thing Microsoft is trying to do, I think is put more stuff out there quicker, get feedback on it. And yeah, it gives a sign of confidence of showing stuff off that isn't finished yet. Yeah, I would say kudos to that. Because you and like, for instance, Jeff Fridge, they seem enjoying the way they're doing what they're doing. And yeah, we're loving it.
Rick
True.
Laurent
Yeah, and enjoying what you're doing is an important part of the job. I mean, you know, we are blessed. Most I mean, many, many developers, in any case, are blessed with the fact that not only we do what we love, I mean, I couldn't not go write it just not something I could do. We when I'm retired, I mean to write code, I think for you know, to relax or something. But at the same time, we are paid for it. So this is great. And in my case, I'm paid to help people and to find ways to help them. So this, I mean, there is nothing better than to wake up in the morning and finding your email somebody saying, oh, I saw your talk last week. It helped me solve a problem I had. You know, that's like the best feeling. That's why we do that.
Totally random question – 34:40
Rick
Yeah, I totally agree. Oscar. Do you know what time it is?
Oscar
Is it time for a totally random question?
Rick
It is time for a totally random question. Laurent if you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would it serve?
Laurent
Wow. Oh, that is a totally random question and an interesting one. I'm a foodie like, you have no idea how much I like to eat and I need to be really careful because COVID has been a little bit dead to my waist. And I'm also a cook and my wife is an amazing cook my wife is Filipino and so I don't know if you have ever had Filipino food but it's like the definition of comfort food you know, it's fantastic food.
Rick
And probably we haven't had proper Filipino food.
Laurent
That is possible. Yeah, I mean, who knows? Definitely come to my house next time you're in Switzerland we will change that. So if I had the restaurant so first of all, let me preface that by saying that I've had people in my family who had restaurant and it's like the most one of the most difficult jobs in the world because of the working hours of the, the difficulty to satisfy customers etc., etc. It's also gratifying when you when you please them but it's really hard so I would never have a restaurant. I love to cook but I yeah, when you start charging for it is when really trouble starts. Nonetheless, I mean, maybe I would try to promote the food from my state, my home state in Switzerland, we have 26 states. And each state has its own identity, its own culture, you know, its own dialect sometimes and, and its own food. And so I come from, from a state called Vo of Heartland in German, which is at lake level in North Lake Geneva, right. Don't offend me by saying Lake Geneva, Lake Lemon. Cause it doesn't belong just to Geneva. Geneva has like a small super small portion of the lake. So the state I come from has the biggest part of the lake. And the main city there is called Lausanne DC where I was born and raised. And we have amazing food there. It's mostly farmer food I would say it's a lot of sausages a lot of you know like dishes where you have butter and cream pretty rich pretty delicious. Great especially in winter or in or in autumn where the only the only relief you have from the weather is always there is a good meal on the table. And there are a few good restaurants from that state you know, in Switzerland, but I don't think there are some worldwide so if I had enough power and money I would probably open a chain of those. And make sure that these have really quality farmer food left and right and make people happy these ways that could be fun. Yeah.
Oscar
I'm so hungry right now.
Rick
He was drooling opposite of me. Well, it does it does sound good. It does sound a bit to be honest. Like I'm not entirely sure if this was the case but it does sound a bit like Dutch winter food that we have here with hutspot that's a...
Laurent
You know, when you when you go north the food changes, right and so you go from a very happy food Mediterranean food is a happy food right? You have a lot of olive oil, this is like certainly in your in your plate and, and a lot of you know grilled fish, which is like lean and delicious and flavor and herbs right like thyme and rosemary and all that. And then you move to the north and things change a bit because in the north you have six months of bad weather you have to cook.
Oscar
Come in wet and you need some food that hugs you.
Laurent
Exactly, exactly, exactly. That is so true. And one of the some of the best food I've had is in Iceland, for example, whereas they don't have a lot of, of resources in terms of food, like vegetables have to be grown in a greenhouse, etc, etc. But oh my god, if you have an Icelandic fish soup, you know that like wow, okay, it's the weather can be crappy outside, but you don't care. You have your Icelandic dish.
The story behind the tattoos of Laurent – 38:51
Rick
That sounds about right. One other thing that I would like to touch upon briefly if that's okay is if we, if we look you up online, then you have this. I mean, pretty outstanding profile picture that comes back on multiple occasions, where you very proudly show off your tattooed wrists or forearms? There's bound to be a story behind those.
Laurent
Yeah, very Yeah. How much time do you have? No, I'm a I'm a guy who believes in symbols very much. So first of all, let me start by saying I only started getting tattoos when I was 45. I think so relatively late in life and there is a whole story to that as well, but it's not the place for that. But essentially, symbolism and metal and all kinds of you know very, how should I say first bounds rituals, right, like, like heavy metal is something which is like bound to the earth you know, and etcetera have been very important for me my whole life I started listening to metal when I was 14 or 13. My very first audio tape was peace of mind Nadan which was released in '83. Two I was 12. I don't think I bought it when it came out immediately, but probably when I was 13. And since then I never stopped listening to metal and other things like I'm in Seattle, so of course, I mean, I'm in Seattle right now I come to Seattle a lot, I listen to grunge of course, etcetera, etcetera. So, so metal is like very wide. So, you know, not just one thing. And so, of course, getting tattooed was also a way for me to continue my exploration of that world, I would say, and I work with a with a really good tattoo artist. And so the interesting thing is that in Switzerland, you have multiple cultures and multiple languages. So I come from the western side, like I was saying before, where my, my main language is French, but I live in Zurich, which is Germanic, right, it's Alamanni kind. And the reason why we have those languages in, in Switzerland is goes back to, you know, the Roman times where a lot of Germans at the time came down from the north, they were hungry and miserable because of famine. And basically, they came down and they went all the way to Rome, right, as it goes into these egos, and all the way to do you know, pretty far south, right? They went to Spain, etc. And of course, they came to Switzerland as well. And in Switzerland, you have the people called the Elbeds, who are actually Celts. So there is a huge Celtic civilization in Switzerland, they held it. And the Germans basically pushed them west until they couldn't anymore because there was a big river, which is still there. This is the Sarine in French or the Saane in German. And this is still today's delimitation of the languages. So you know, west of the Sarine , we speak French east, basically German. And that goes all the way back to 400. AD, right. So when I moved to Zurich, I left behind, well, no, I don't want to say I left behind, I took it with me. But I also changed culture very much. And even though it's the same country, we you know, have the same some of the aspects of the culture are the same but a lot is different. And really, in for example, my place is a wine culture right from the south. And, and Zurich is a beer culture, obviously, it's a different, like, the base beverage that you drink at parties is different. So this is one example. Of course the language is different.
Rick
But that's quite a big difference already.
Laurent
That's a big difference. Definitely. And so I don't know at some point, I started listening to metal, made in Switzerland, a band called elevate, I really liked them. They do kind of death metal, but we also Celtic instruments. Things like the whole the Goldie, which is a type of violin, or you know, some flutes, and some bagpipes and all kinds of things. And listening to those sounds can kind of walk something into me like I was like, wow, that is amazing. I knew it. I knew this. I knew the sculpture, but I didn't realize how deep it went into my heart. And that's what I realized that, okay, I'm living in a place, which is not my culture, I am Celtic, Celt, you know, in, in origin, of course, with all the changes and, you know, that leads through the world, but my family has been bound to the same place since at least 1200. We know, because we found records. And before that they didn't keep record. So I, I've always been in the same place, my family has always been in the same place. And so yeah, and that kind of wanting to indicate that. And so most of the tattoos I have are Celtic, I have a tree of life on my shoulder, I have triquetra, which is one you can see in my profile picture on my wrist, I also have a skull on my wrist, because the skull is a good reminder that when we die, all that is left behind is a skull. And when you look at the skull, you can not immediately know if the person was a man or a woman if they were, you know, black, red, brown, white, green, or whatever color they are. And essentially, in the end, we're all equal in death, right? So it's a good reminder of that, you know, trying to remember that we should also be equal in life, etc, etc. So a lot of Celtic stuff. I also have a big Asian dragon on my shoulder because I also have some ties to Asia, one of them being my amazing wife, like I mentioned before. And so yes, all that is, you know, trying to, I guess new tattoos or for yourself and then after that you also show them off to your friends. But I would say for me, it's really like, when I look at my wrist I'm like, oh, yeah, that's my identity and you travel so much. You talk to so many different people from different, different culture. It's also interesting and an important thing to remember your own identity and where you come from. And I'm not a nationalist in any way, my passport doesn't matter much to me, but the Celtic culture kind of does. And I'm very proud actually, that I'm, I'm a I'm a Celt of the East, but when I talk to somebody in Wales are in other places, this is the same underlying culture. And there are some symbols, like the treaty law, for example, which are all over the place because of that culture. And this is a Yeah, it's a it's a good reminder. I think.
Oscar
So there was a lot behind that question, Rick.
Rick
No, but this was so cool.
Oscar
No, no.
Rick
The cool thing is that, I mean, there's different reasons for getting tattoos and the fact that you have such a well thought out idea about your actual own identity and your heritage, and everything behind it only makes the tattoos more valuable as far as I'm concerned. So it's nice to hear that one.
Oscar
It's great to, to have an episode also to get to know one of our friends from the community, right? And to know not only the technology we're all passionate about, but something behind the story. Is there...
Laurent
I'm so happy. I'm so happy, I have a chance to tell that story. So thank you so much.
Rick
Yeah, no problem.
Closing – 46:12
Oscar
Is there anything that we completely missed? Or you want to add on? You know, in the time that we still have?
Laurent
My wife tells me oh, wow, you really love to talk? Right? I can hear her laughing right now, if she's listening. So because it's true, I mean, you know, there is nothing better than to talk for a whole evening with friends. So definitely, yes, there is obviously more things to say. I think the main thing I'm really proud of right now is and to go back to work is the show and producing learn live, we try to do the best job of actually helping people to learn. And if people go there and check it out, and also pass me feedback, what would you like to see what can we do better? How can we it's a live show. It's an interactive show. So if you go on the show at the time of streaming, you will actually be able to ask questions from the presenters. And I don't know many shows who do that a lot these days is pre recorded. And you know, it's good content, but you cannot ask the question directly, right. Another thing of live is that it's a 90 minute show, typically. So it's quite long. If you compare that to a 30 second Tik Tok or a two minute video on Twitter. And again, kudos to people who do that there is definitely a need for that. But I believe there is also a need for long, long form content. And this is what we do. Also things are of course, all the conference we do. So now we are in a place where we are starting to think about Ignite and other things. And I definitely cannot say anything about that, as you understand right now, this is still very early. But basically, we just finished build and those first party conferences, like we call them are a huge work and having you know people participating to that is a big reward. So again, right, let us know what we did bad let us know what we can do better. It's many, many teams and many people behind that. And sometimes we take decisions, which we shouldn't have. And we'd love to hear more about that. So let us know. Feedback is super important. People can find me on Twitter, it's @LBugnion. And if you send an email to my Twitter lbugnion@microsoft.com, you will also reach me so feel free to send me an email. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Yeah, I love feedback.
Oscar
Cool, we'll definitely link some, some of that content in the show notes.
Laurent
Thank you.
Rick
Yeah. So it's been awesome to have the time to both talk, tech, but also get to know you a little bit better. So thank you so much for being here.
Laurent
My pleasure.
Oscar
Yeah. Thank you for being our guest.
Rick
Thank you for listening to Betatalks the podcast, we publish a new episode every two weeks.
Oscar
You can find us on all the major streaming platforms like Spotify and iTunes.
Rick
See you next time.
Oscar
Bye.
