2 weeks full of highlights

Wow ! Normally I post about VSTS or TFS or just about some other techy stuff but my last 2 weeks were so packed with highlights, both personally and at Xpirit, I just wanted it to share with you. I’ll first give you the executive summary

• Personally
  • I became ALM MVP for the 5th time in a row
  • I went to //Build 2016 in San Francisco
  • I had 4 hours of training on the Microsoft HoloLens
  • I was confirmed as a speaker on NDC Oslo
  • I work 1 year at Xpirit and it is great !
  • I booked Martin Hinshelwood as a speaker on the Dutch Microsoft ALM Meetup Group

• At Xpirit
  • We launched our new magazine Xpirit Magazine 2
  • Yet another colleague (Peter Groenewegen) became Microsoft MVP
  • My colleague Roy Cornelissen who is a Xamarin MVP is now (although not officialy) a Microsoft MVP as well
  • My colleague Jesse Houwing became Certified Scaled Scrum Trainer
  • We went to //Build with 4 guys
  • We welcomed a new mobile Rockstar, Geert van der Cruijsen

You can image who excited I am after all this. Let me fill in some details.

Microsoft MVP for the 5th time

Although it was the 5th time, it is always exciting and you do not get used to it. April 1st I received the email in which the statement said. Congratulations !!

I feel it as a great honour and privilege to be part of this vivid community. Especially now at Xpirit it is great to be able to speak, blog, travel, post and inspire others about new technology and other great stuff. Thanks Marcel de Vries and Pascal Greuter for weloming me at Xpirit and enable me to keep contributing to this great community!

Build 2016

I went to //Build in San Francisco. Build is only 3 days but as MVP I had the opportunity to spend another 2 days in private sessions. The first day was with the Azure CAT team. It is a special elite team that takes care of special customer needs. There we did a hackathon with new technology and I was able to play with a Cassandra cluster.

I had never heard of Cassandra but I try to explain it in short. Cassandra is a distributed database that can be tuned fine-grained for reads, writes and redundancy. Together with my colleague Alex Thissen we were able to setup a full Cassandra cluster on Azure. With Load Balancing and Traffic Manager and present it to the group. We became second place. Right after our biggest competitor and collegue Marcel .

Second day was all NDA stuff with various Azure product teams. and I did some sightseeing

Build was great. I followed some breakouts but also some private sessions. See my twitter Storify for a complete summary !

HoloLens

Oh man ! was that great I had the opportunity to play and program with the HoloLens! I was in the standby queue and the miracle happened. I was allowed in. The good news is that I can redo the experience (somewhat) because all source code that we used is Open Source and can be found here .

Xpirit Magazine

We introduced our 2nd edition of our magazine. You can freely download your issue, download separate articles or order your physical copy. We are very proud!

My article is about Docker and how it will impact the Microsoft Developer !

This were my 2 weeks ! Hope you enjoy the read !