 Hello, we're here for a second episode of our Cloud Dev Clarity podcast or show or whatever you want to call it. Today or in this episode, in episode two and episode three, we would like to, Julie and I want to go through and introduce ourselves for those of you who may not be familiar with us. So you kind of have some context around who's going to be on this show. So let me bring in and say, here's Julie. That's me. And I'm not Johnny. That's very old reference. That's a very old reference. Most people will not get that one probably. Well, I mean, hopefully a lot of people will get it, but you know, they don't get it then. That's okay. But Julie, today what we're doing or in this, in this video, what we're doing is we are going to, I want you to introduce yourself to our listener. So maybe, you know, I don't know. Yeah, we're going to do the way back machine. We're going to go all the way back. Not all the way back because that would be too far. But let's go back to college. Let's start there. Sweet. I gotta go get my drink refilled. No, the idea of this episode and the next one is really just so that people, if they don't know us, then this is a way for them to get to know us a bit more and have a little bit more context on us. And so, you know, hey, look, I don't expect many people to watch the next episode of interview of me. I don't expect very many people to watch the interview of you. I mean, it's, would people, this is more for like, if you're interested to know who we are. Here's the, here's us telling you who we are instead of you trying to go figure it out. But yeah, I mean, if you're looking for content, jump to episode four. Yeah, and we'll, and we'll include like links to all those social media places where we exist in the show notes. So, yeah, down below. So you can find us and get in touch with us if you want to. Yeah, why don't I just sort of like sort of actually do what I just said so going in the way back machine, I went to college at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I have a degree in electrical engineering, specializing in microprocessor system design, which just means I did a lot of BLSI and machine code writing and C++ writing to circuit boards and all that kind of fun stuff that you do in electrical engineering. And then I graduated, but while I was in college, I did a lot of software development work because I had grown up doing software development. Got, you know, an Apple II way back when went to computer camps, all that kind of stuff. So I got jobs in college doing software development. And when I graduated, I was like, huh, I think I'd rather just do the software development thing. So I started working in internal IT departments doing, you know, what was the thing at the time which was client server based development. Where you had, you know, a Windows client, you know, you built it using visual basic or one of those types of tools, but generally visual basic.net stack with either a SQL server or an Oracle server back in. And that was sort of the way you did things until ASP.net came along. And so you started doing some web stuff. And so I did some of that as well. So, you know, that was primarily what I did. And then, you know, working through the ranks became a manager, blah, blah, blah, became a director of IT at a bio research clinical research facility contract research. And that once I became a director of IT, I sort of was still doing a lot of development. But then we had to, you know, I had to start thinking about commercial software and how we were going to make our processes better. So that was a big part of the background. And so I, that's when I got introduced to SharePoint. So the 2007 edition of SharePoint. And I did the unthinkable, which is to 21 CFR Part 11 certify our SharePoint environment so that we could keep research data in SharePoint. And so, yeah, it was, I was Craig Craig, for sure. It was quite the undertaking. But if you, if you understand the regs, it's not actually as hard as it sounds. So we did that certification. 2010 came out and we recertified. And I realized at that point that I was getting bored. And it was kind of why I kept switching companies. You know, I would switch companies like every two years. And I realized that I'm getting bored because I need to constantly be challenged. And when you work in an internal IT department, you do the same stuff all the time. You know, and once you build it, yeah, you're in maintenance mode, but you're not building anything new. And I was so bored. And so irony, the company that I, the consulting company I hired to help me implement SharePoint in our, our, you know, environment at the company I was working at, I went and worked for as a consultant. So I jumped ship started becoming a consultant that was 2010. And so I worked for a bunch of small firms, most notably Blue Metal, which was sort of a boutique, you know, Microsoft based consulting firm in the Boston, New York, Chicago area while I was there. And I met Bob German while I was working there, who is the, you know, the OG Microsoft guy and became very good friends with him. And he and I in 2015 co-developed something we called the widget wrangler, which without knowing it was totally the conceptual precursor, not that they got the idea from us, but it was, we were on the same path as the SharePoint framework. I brought a total irony. So we released the widget wrangler in January of 2016. I started my public speaking journey at that point. We went to my first Bob invited me to go to the first SharePoint framework dev kitchen, which is where I met Mark Anderson, whom I then three months later or four months later joined him he was solo in a company called some practice consulting. And so I joined him and so it was him and I some practice consulting for a couple of years. And then we looked at each other and said, maybe we need some more people in this party. And that's when we threw the speaking thing because Mark absolutely sort of, you know, shepherded me into the bigger speaking roles instead of just being in, you know, community SharePoint Saturdays and, you know, community things like the Boston user group and that kind of stuff shepherded me to the sort of bigger venues. So started going to some of the bigger conferences and speaking at some of the bigger conferences. And then we met Todd, well, Mark already knew Todd, but I met Todd and we, you know, got Todd Clint and got a little bit more, you know, working together and stuff and so asked him if he wanted to join us since he did. And then my former coworker from Blue Metal Derek Cash Peterson wanted to leave Blue Metal. And I was like, dude, come work with us. We're having a party. And so we added Derek. And then we added one of our own clients so similar to how I got pulled out of my company to join a consultancy. We pulled Emily Mancini out of her company and she joined us. And then our, and then this is where it gets totally incestuous. Our last member Michael Ronan was my boss, and the person who was the lead one of the lead people, introducing the SharePoint back when I worked for that original company, joined Sympraxis. So that's how incestuous the whole group is. But that's how, so that's my life story. That's how I sort of got here. So that's how I, you know, became part of the community. And, you know, doing the speaking thing and really, you know, because that's one thing that Sympraxis were sort of all about is embracing the community because we really feel strongly that by engaging in the community, we not only bring ourselves up our own knowledge by sharing knowledge and getting gaining knowledge from other people but sharing our knowledge with others, you know, raises all boats and we really, you know, appreciate that aesthetic. So that's, that's sort of how it all happened. I'm sitting here listening to this. And if I'm sorry, if in the background, if I was like distracted because I had to f 18 hornets like fly over our fly over our house like I don't know if that was picked up by the microphone but like it, I heard something but not the third day in a row they've done it and they both get low and you can kind of hear from a distance going okay they're coming that I doubt they're going to be low because I look it's we have a navy base kind of close to us and all of a sudden it's like right over our house. Oh, Jesus. So just, but I, if I look like I was like in like infatuated with your story. I don't remember when we met. But I know exactly where we met because it was one of those fangirl moments. It was at SP tech con Boston. We were in the cocktail party. After the first day of sessions and you were standing with Eric shops, and Mark was standing there and because I'm a dev person, you know, I had and had been working in SharePoint now for a little while. The way I sort of introduced myself to extending the SharePoint platform was using some of your educational materials from when you were at critical path and the books that you wrote blah blah blah and I had attended a bunch of your sessions. And so I knew of you but had not met you. And Mark's like, Oh, I know Andrew, I'll introduce you. And so he walked me up to you and Eric, and I fangirled on you for like a few seconds. I probably don't remember that. I was like, blah blah blah and your session was so good. And Eric just stood there and like, What about me? My chocolate? Yes. No, just kidding, Eric. But I found it so funny because as I'm listening to your story, you know, as long as I've known you, I didn't, and I knew a lot of your history, but I didn't know it like that. Yep. You're going to see a lot of like corollaries to my history of how I got to where I am. Because I'm listening to your story. I'm like, Oh my God, that's how I did. Oh my God, that's how I did. Oh my God. It's crazy that there's so much stuff that's over. But yeah. And so one of the things you described to was how the company you're with right now, Sympraxis, if you know, you guys look up there and you see this logo that Julie did for us, which I mean, everything has to have a logo, right? Not an artist. But I mean, no, we're dead, right? Hey, we're trying to keep it real. Right. No fancy font that's up there in the, I don't know where we're trying to point, but up there for the colors. Century Gothic right there. The logo that's above me, the right side of the right side of the logo that's the purple and the green, that's your company's logo. Right. You have to watch the second, the third episode to find out what the orange and the blue came from. Oh, shocker. Right. But anyway, that's cool. So you got into SharePoint 2007, 2007. Yep. When you got into it, were you doing much dev then or was it mostly on the content? It was implementation side. It was implementation. We didn't want, I didn't want to do any dev on it because that made certification harder. Got it. Because then change control becomes even more complicated. What we were able to do with certification was to say, we can say that these are how all the different pieces of this platform are intended to work, and we can document how they are intended to work. And as long as we validated every time a patch was installed, that all of those things still work the same way, we could say that this platform was validated. And so it was a very, we had a little bit of, you know, guardrails around what we were able to do because of that. But back in the on-prem days, you could also insert code on the page a little bit easier. So the 2010 one, we would have been able to extend and be able to like say, hey, this page has a custom thing in it. And we could certify that that page was going to behave differently. And this was what was in it and put change control on the stuff that's on that page. Whereas if you were doing a farm solution, it would have been much more onerous to do that certification. So we didn't go that route. So when did you start focusing? When did you start doing more dev, more development stuff, more custom dev on the SharePoint platform? Was that 2010? Yeah, the 2010 platform. Yeah, when I joined KMA at the time. And in terms of like backgrounds, I'm trying to give people a little bit of context too. Like what your, because most people, you and I, you're mostly like your background, I would say, as people know you as a SharePoint developer. Yeah. And today that means SharePoint framework. But your history goes back doing, I presume, farm solutions, sandbox solutions, add-ins. I never did add-ins. I skipped add-ins. Bless your heart. I was so brilliant. I decided to have a baby instead. Oh God. I literally, no, that's it actually, that's an interesting point, the point, because add-in model came out in 2013. And if we go back to the Wayback machine when we would have the SharePoint conference, which was way more important when you had the on-prem releases, right? Because you'd have the 2007 version or the 2010 version or the 2013 version. The three-year cycle. And you'd have that three-year cycle and you'd want to go to that conference because you would need to know everything that was changing. You had no run-up to it, really, unless you were really on the in, you had no run-up to it. So you wanted to go to that conference because that's where you were going to learn everything you needed to know for the next two to three years. Yeah. And so I had my son in September of 2012, and the SharePoint conference for the 2013 version was in November-ish, I want to say. Nope, you're right. And I was on maternity leave. And so I didn't go to that conference. And so Bob and Derek, who we all worked together at Blue Metal, they went, but I didn't go. And so they learned the add-in model. And when I got back, one of the things that Bob and I started talking about so much was that the add-in model, although cool, was hard. It just felt like a lot of overhead and a lot of heft when you could do this stuff in the page. And so then we started talking about, well, OK, if you can put JavaScript on the page using a script editor or a content editor web part, how do you make that a little bit more robust? How do you make sure that you have some sort of ALM around it? I mean, it would never going to be perfect, but what could you do? And so we started thinking about, OK, what if we created a site collection with document library that held our code? Maybe not the most performant thing on the world, but for these small applications and with caching, it worked just fine. There was really no problem with it. And certainly we could make it more robust, but for the smaller clients that we had, doing that seemed fine. So we would put the code in a library in a central site collection that we would name even the CDN. And then we'd use the widget wrangler to load those web parts and whatever version we wanted of those web parts onto the page so we can make sure we have the dependencies and blah, blah, blah. So like I said, it is almost the same construct as the SharePoint framework. We just didn't know we were doing it until three months later when we went to DevKitchen and went, huh, this is just like what we did. Yeah, that's interesting. So you skipped add-ins, which was, I mean, I'm a male, but trust me, you said you had a baby during that. It felt like I did the same too when I was doing add-ins. Yeah, probably really painful. And so today, so I guess who knows how long we ended up doing this show, but let's just, right now it's June of 2022. So for some context, today your, where would you say the majority of your Dev is today? Your Dev life is today. Almost 90, well, it's a 95% writing client-side code in the SharePoint framework or for teams, although I don't do a lot of teams apps. We've had this conversation before, just not a lot of call for it in my consulting life. If they want an extension, they want it for not only teams, but SharePoint too. Teams is sort of the second part of that. There's not a lot of organizations that are teams only and they need teams only extensibility. But I do do quite a bit of, because I'm sort of in that, so my role at Sympraxis is sort of, I call myself the CTO just because people like to know what your role is. But there's six of us. That means very little, other than I'm probably the most senior technical developer of the group, you know, because of my background and whatever. So, you know, if there's extents like integrations that need to be done, I'm going to be the one doing that. So for the most part, so that means I'm going to be using Azure resources and doing my sort of what was the server-side code there now. And so that for me, that just means I write C-Sharp because I came up through the client server model where all I was writing was C-Sharp. Learning JavaScript came for me in 2013. And then I learned a lot of JavaScript patterns, you know, kind of things and like learn how to write JavaScript. And then I learned how to write TypeScript. And you might even remember that you and I talked about like learning TypeScript, me learning TypeScript. It took me three days to make the transition and it was like painful. And I give you all my notes of like, what, why, what are we doing? This doesn't make any sense. Remember that? Yeah. So then I switched to TypeScript, which in hindsight, I'm so glad for. I like I prefer it significantly because it is so much more like C-Sharp for me. But still switching back and forth between C-Sharp and TypeScript is painful. I'm just like, wait, what am I doing again? And so I do switch back and forth and you've mentioned it several times. I want to, I think I want to say that what, what, I think it's been more recent that you've really seen Azure exploiting NodeJS as a platform. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think when it first started, the stuff that you would see would be based on the .NET framework or you know what I mean? And then they really started embracing Node after and I just haven't made the transition to writing my server code in Node. Yeah. And I think that a lot of that too is just when you look at like what, when Azure kind of came about. I mean, they were their target audience when it comes to developers or Microsoft developers, which is, I mean, those are .NET people. And so that makes the most sense. And now that I guess that now that market is saturated and now that Azure is on the same. Well, okay, this is debatable, but now they're on the same footing as the other public clouds. Yeah. AWS GCP, then you're going to go look, they're going to, you're going to see people asking questions about, you know, looking at it is like, I want to either build multi cloud solutions or I want to be able to build the same kind of thing I do on AWS or want to do on Azure or vice versa. And so they are like, we know we have to support this and I have to support this. We have to support this and all these different ones. When you look at AWS and I think the majority of the code that runs on AWS is probably Java based. Yeah. And most of the startup stuff that you see over there is probably Ruby and Python. You look over at Google and I think that a lot of their stuff as well is a lot of Java and go. And so I mean, I think that's just part of the nature of the audience. But yeah, I do, they're just making sure that they want to be able to give the same offering to no matter you're not going to be hamstrung, whichever platform you choose. 100%. And I think it's great. It's just if you come from that, which is what I did, making that transition is just like a, unless you stop and think about it, you don't really transition. Do you know what I'm saying? Like you're not, you're not going to make that switch when there's no onus to necessarily making that switch. Right. So another question. So today then another way that people know you, I'm going to try and tease out some more information on the bio from you. Okay. So another way that people would know you today is your involvement with a very popular library. Yeah, that is that works both in node and also works is very popular in the SharePoint framework. Yeah, the patterns and practices group which is pmp js. And ironically, I was just going to bring it up because I was going to say one of the things, you know, as of today, one of the things that we'll be releasing in the next version of pmp js is the tenant SharePoint tenant based rest endpoints. And the push for that is really coming from exactly what we just talked about where people are starting to use a node based library to do server based things. Nobody ever needed the tenant API's if you were just working in the client. It was just not something. Why would you ever, right? Like your your your delegated permissions were probably not or shouldn't give you access to it anyway. So it would not be something you should be doing. But now we're seeing this we're seeing this migration or or integration right of developers who write in node js for the server and thereby want an SDK that's node based to support all of these endpoints. So it's a real interesting shift from that perspective. So yes, in bjs is I work with Patrick Rogers who is a Microsoft employee, but he does this in his spare time and does an amazing job at it. He's a great person to work with and I'm thrilled to be collaborating with him. So that's definitely one of the projects the other project I do is I work regularly and have for the last gosh, at least three years. I probably work with him every single day is the absolutely amazing one and only chef and bower of he lives in Austria, Vienna, Austria. He has a company he calls NAD design, and he is just amazing at web development in general like understands the that space better than anybody else I know, and is an marvel at HTML and CSS like understands those languages. And I think you could call them that really really really well so we collaborate. And I think, you know, my, well my understanding of those platforms is increased exponentially but further, because we work together. He does all the design and writes all the HTML and CSS for projects that I do and then I do all the typescript development and orchestration of all of that. And I think we can, we can probably go faster than just about anybody with a really high quality level so it's really fun to work with him. One of the things that he and I built again as a community project is he took the Microsoft fluent UI design language and built a pure HTML and CSS implementation of that design language. And then I took that pure HTML and CSS implementation and built a react.js based component library for all, almost all about 95% coverage of all the, the elements that he's built so that's an open source project that he and I maintain on a monthly basis as well. So, yeah, I got a lot of community community work that I've been working on. It's a lot. It's fun. It's super fun. So, and then all the stuff you do on the Azure side is mostly just to support that all of that work. Yeah, the client, the consulting work that I do, you know, people need a solution that would need like inventing for their entire tenant or, you know, UI based solutions, you know, they need a custom solution that, you know, writes to either database or SQL data or even list based data, you know, list and library based data in the SharePoint platform or whatever it might be. Yeah, we build those custom solutions using the SharePoint framework, and then with some backend stuff often. So cool. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, that's a good. That's a good. Yeah, that's a good who's Julie. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for sharing your intro. Now people have some context about you and Yeah, next year up, hopefully I can do as well as as an interviewer. I didn't do much of an interview on this one. That was pretty good. Thing was pretty good. Well, cool. Well, then if anybody wants to get in touch with you as always best way to hit you is through that Twitter. Handles right there. You can DM me and and that's a good way and we'll put some other things in the show notes like yeah, then and whatever. So you can find me there. Yeah, or drop a comment in the show notes where you can actually see that to learn as well. Awesome. Well, with that, when I ask everybody, hey, what did you think about this episode? If you can let us know by dropping a comment below or to submit a topic and discuss on future cloud dev clarity episodes. If you like this video, please give us a thumbs up and smash that big red subscribe button so that on the below the video so that you'll see when we post more cloud dev clarity episode videos for developers on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure and related topics. So until then, we'll see you in the next video. Thanks everybody.