Triple header: Scrum & the “Product person” + Azure DevOps & CosmosDB + ML.NET

Melbourne .NET User Group double header: Scrum and the “Product person” + Azure DevOps and CosmosDB

Session #1: The View From The Bridge – presented by Chris Drylie
The importance of having direction and the right focus is not as clear cut as most of companies think. Here we will review what the dev team is made up of and the why it is so important to have that ‘Product’ person as part of the team and not just someone who sits on the side lines telling you what people want and why they want it. Cutting through buzz words like Product Owner and Manager and understanding the core of these principles and what they bring to the team.

This presentation will discuss these challenges faced when a new Product member joins a development team that has never had this voice before and how to address these concerns that follow and the positive/negative outcomes of a change of this nature. How this increased volume, variety, and velocity of work being generated by these teams, but put them under a spotlight they had never been part of before. We will also touch on the point that this is not limited to any one methodology and how this person bridges the gap between the development team and the world.

About the presenter:
Chris Drylie had the dream of becoming the first Scottish NBA player, however it turned out that 'Robert Archibald' beat him to it back in 2002. Since this dream crushing realization, Chris set his sights on becoming the best Product Management Leader he could. Now with over 16+ years working in the IT industry, he finds himself as the Senior Product Owner at StarRez Inc. Where he has learned to thrive in the chaos of software development. He has taken his passion and applied it to managing complex cross-team initiatives and strategic programs. he helps organizations be more productive, thereby making it possible to achieve their business goals and sometimes plays basketball on the side.

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Session #2: DevOps saves you $$$ - Slash your CosmosDB cost while Boosting your Performance – presented by William Liebenberg

In this presentation William Liebenberg who has used SQL Server for 10 years, will show you how he changed his world using CosmosDB.
William will show you how to set up your Azure DevOps Build Pipeline for automated cost testing with CosmosDB. You will learn the secrets to reduce costs and optimize performance by using measurements from your tests.

Today we measure test outcomes in terms of success or failure. Tomorrow with CosmosDB we also need to consider many other factors eg. selecting an appropriate partition key, consistency level and how we structure our queries.

About the presenter:
William Liebenberg is a Solution Architect at SSW with almost 15 years of professional experience. He loves building enterprise-grade applications and sharing what he learns along the way. Currently he specializes in Azure, .NET Core, Angular, and Azure DevOps. William also presents the SSW Azure Superpowers Tour around Australia and hosts the Melbourne .NET User Group.

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Session #3: Simple Machine Learning classification with ML.NET presented by Jernej Kavka

Tired of doing to machine learning talks and still having no idea how you can actually use that in practice? Fear not, JK will attempt to explain how to do machine learning classification in 15 minutes! No math or data science required!

About the presenter:
With around 10 years of experience in software engineering, Jernej has worked on full-stack .NET development, mobile applications, and Microsoft Cognitive Services. He worked for some of Australia's largest corporations, with great customer satisfaction.