In this article, I am going to tell you about my speaker and community engagements for 2020. I also plan to update the article after each conference with some pictures as well as tell you about how my experience was.

Nordic Infrastructure Conference

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Nordic Infrastructure Conference was arranged for the 9th year in Oslo, Norway - February 6th - 7th, 2020. For several years the conference has brought both international and local speakers to Norway, sharing their knowledge and experience with the attendees.

This year, Executive Vise President of Microsoft Azure, Jason Zander came to NIC doing the keynote session “The cloud`s impact on the future of computing”:

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In the keynote, Jason of course talked about a lot of the technologies available in Azure, but he also brought up some very interesting scenarios where these technologies can help customers achieve more. Such as IoT-sensors in the fishing industry, and the option to put a Kubernetes deployment in a backpack for use with drones when searching for missing people in disconnected areas to name a couple.

Conferences is also about meeting friends, colleagues, vendors and customers in order to discuss challenges and find solutions:

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I held a session on day 1 called “Managing your Azure infrastructure using Terraform”. In this session, I introduced the concept of Infrastructure as Code, before diving into Terraform specifically. After showing the basics, I showed a scenario from a customer engagement where the same configuration was used to deploy infrastructure for an e-commerce application to different environments. The slides and demos from the session is available here.

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Experts Live Norway

The Second Edition of this conference is happening in Oslo, Norway on May 28th, 2020.

Experts Live is a non-profit organization based in The Netherlands that has a mission to “enable sharing of knowledge and experience about Microsoft technologies worldwide” and was founded by Maarten Goet (MVP, RD), more information about the conference is available here.

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I am looking forward to attending and speaking at this conference for the first time. My session will be about how to manage a hybrid infrastructure using Azure Functions.

PowerShell Conference Europe

Europe`s largest PowerShell-themed annual conference is being held June 2-5, 2020 in Hannover, Germany.

Check out the schedule to see the many great sessions. No matter if you are a PowerShell beginner, or a seasoned user - there will be lots of content for you.

I have been attending and speaking at the conference for the last 3 years, and although the sessions is a great part of attending - the atmosphere and the opportunity meet and talk to people from the community is even bigger for me. Numerous times people you only know from online scenes such as Twitter is attending, so being able to meet and chat in person is great.

Check out the psconf.eu 2019 aftermovie to get a sense of the atmosphere:

The Norwegian MVP Day

In the last couple of years, the Norwegian MVP community have arranged a community day where we share relevant information, targeted at Norwegian customers and organizations. The theme for this year is: “2020 what MS can do for you: Going beyond 365”.

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The event will happen on October 8th, shortly after Microsoft Ignite. Hence, I am planning to do a session with relevant news from there around automation.

More information about the event is available here.

User groups

I am involved as an organizer and board member in two user groups, the first being Azure User Group Norway. We have plans to host a round table event later this year, in addition to regular online meetings.

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The second user group is being rebranded these days, more information will be published as soon as the new name is official - stay tuned!

Microsoft Ignite

Since I started attending IT conferences around 2008 I have always attended the smaller ones. They have been mostly PowerShell focused, but also some others like Microsoft Ignite On Tour. Hence, I have never attended the larger ones such as Microsoft Ignite (formerly Teched).

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This year however, I plan to submit some proposals for Microsoft Ignite (September 21–25, 2020) in New Orleans.

Summary

2020 will be a busy, but also a very exciting year with regards to community engagements. The technologies I work with (mostly Azure and automation) also evolve a lot, and a lot more is to come - fun times!