My name is Nolwenn Nasri, and I am a freelance UX / UI designer. In 2020 I completely questioned my freelance activity. Here's my unfiltered experience.
My name is Nolwenn Nasri, and I am a freelance UX / UI designer, as well as the founder of Freelances Travel, a small company whichdedicates to the organisation of coworking stays with other freelancers. In 2020 I completely questioned my freelance activity. Here’s my unfiltered experience.
Ah, 2020… a year that was very unique for all of us.
But I think it might have been especially special for me because in 2020, I became a mother.
Becoming a mother is wonderful. But it’s also a huge upheaval. My daily life was completely turned upside down, and I launched into an intense introspection of various aspects of my life; with the desire to do things differently.
This introspection focused in particular on my activity as a freelance UX / UI designer.
Let me give you a bit of background: I have been freelancing for 5 years, and my activity as a freelance UX / UI designer has been going well for some time. The projects followed one after another, I didn’t have too many problems getting new assignments, the clients were satisfied. In short, everything was going well.
But I was no longer sure where I was going, how to choose my assignments, how to guide the development of my activity. How should I manage my time? I was satisfied with my income but I felt an urge to do more and more, I constantly felt guilty about not working “enough.”
In short, I was a little lost.
Agreed that this is a “rich man’s problem.” A lot of freelancers struggle to find assignments. But it still caused me a lot of frustration.
So I decided to hire a leadership coach.
It was a big decision because it was quite an expense. But I felt I needed it. And it turned out to be an investment that paid off.
What did the coaching sessions consist of?
I imagine you are about to say: “but Nolwenn, what has this to do with your freelance activity?”
These exercises had the aim to take me out of my comfort zone. To make me gain confidence in myself. To make me make decisions and take responsibility for my choices.
I realised that I had two alternatives:
either maximize my working time and grow my business as much as possible to generate more income, or
set a target income to achieve and devote a minimum of time to it, enjoying all my remaining time to develop my sides projects and take care of my daughter
I chose the 2nd option.
After 5 years as a freelancer, my goal is not to earn more, but rather to reduce my working time.
This decision was a big step for me.
But it was still necessary to take concrete measures to move towards this goal. For me, this was done in 3 main steps:
1. Define my priorities for my freelance activity
Today, I consider that I wear two hats: on the one hand, my activity as a UX / UI designer, which allows me to generate the bulk of my income, and on the other hand my Freelances Travel project, which I approach more like a playground.
Whatever the project, I realised that what interested me the most was to forge rich relationships with people, to bring value, to share my knowledge, and to create strong connections.
This is the reason why I decided, in addition to keeping my two hats, to save time to cultivate these connections by either interacting with members of my network on LinkedIn, or by creating content for my Youtube channel.
2. Define concrete objectives in terms of income and working hours
I used a very simple calculation: my ADR (average daily rate) is currently 500 euros; my monthly turnover target is 4000 euros excluding tax per month (no need to specify that, but after charges and taxes, I have about half left net).
4000 divided by 500 equals 8.
Conclusion: I no longer seek to increase my customer volume, on the contrary. I’m just looking to “staff myself” over 8 full days, on assignments that interest me.
I have adopted a fairly compartmentalised weekly organization. Tuesday and Thursday are my “production” days. I’m off every Friday to take care of my daughter. And, the rest of the time, I take care of Freelances Travel, my Youtube channel, and I chat with members of my network. Without forgetting of course to keep me a little time to manage my accounting and prospecting.
I also learned to detach myself from the eyes of others. Many people around me do not understand why I do not seize all the mission opportunities that present themselves to me. Why am I not looking to generate more income? But it’s my choice and I accept it!
And you, how do you see your freelance life? What is your definition of a successful career as a tech & IT freelancer? Where do you draw the line between income and working time?
Sarah Lean (Techielass), Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, discusses getting into community relations and shares tips for a successful data centre migration.
Sarah Lean, aka Techielass, is a Scotland-based IT infrastructure, ops, and sys admin expert and Azure community evangelist. The founder of the Glasgow Azure User Group, Sarah works as a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft and blogs, tweets and has her own YouTube channel. She discusses, cloud careers, how you can get into community relations. What makes a successful data centre migration, and how Data Centre Migration is about technology and people.
I started off in a Sys Admin role, so I was a helpdesk engineer doing morning password resets for everybody, fishing out bits of broken paper from their printers, and stuff like that. I worked my career through those various different roles. In the UK, we call helpdesk roles first-level roles and then second-level is the support engineers that go out to people’s desks. Third-level is when you get to design systems for customers.
So, I basically went through those support levels within my career and just built up lots of experience both internally and externally. I was in companies where they just had a small IT department and they didn’t understand what IT departments did and how crucial they were. And then I also worked for managed service providers, dedicating myself to various different customers, etc.
How did you eventually become a Microsoft cloud advocate and a prominent figure in the Azure community?
I kind of fell into the community role because I wanted to learn Azure and there were no user groups in Scotland. I think the closest user group to me at the time was in London. Which is obviously not something you want to do it you finish working on Wednesday night; go down to London to user group and then come back up to your work the next day. It’s obviously not logistically feasible, so I basically started the Glasgow Azure user group to fulfil my need. Basically, to learn Azure and find out where everybody else was fitting this into the on-prem and cloud worlds.
And yeah, I kind of fell into running the user group and then started speaking at events. People were like “you need to speak at events and share your story and journey”. Which I didn’t want to do. But then I fell into it and; before I knew it; I was getting headhunted to become a cloud advocate at Microsoft.
It definitely hasn’t been a planned evolution in my career, if I’m going to be brutally honest about it. But one that I’m really enjoying and has given me some excellent experiences of travelling to different parts of the world and doing some amazing stuff and meeting some amazing people in the community as well.
What does the cloud advocate position entail?
My role can be quite varied. A summary of my job is to help others find out how to use Microsoft Technologies. Whether that be by telling the story in a simplified manner, maybe in a blog post or a video that kind of connects the dots between. For example, what your on-prem system looks like and what your cloud system would look like.
I’m sure we’ve all read some official documentation on various different products. Not just Microsoft products, and not understood what they were talking about. Being able to digest that into a way that makes sense for everybody. Whether that be someone who’s a project manager or someone who has 100 years of experience in IT, and being able to get that story across to them is something that I do. So, my day can be quite varied.
It can be creating videos, creating blogs, doing podcasts… Or it can be just playing with technology, or creating new Microsoft Learn content as well. There are lots of different facets, and there are lots of different things I can do throughout the day. So it can be quite fun. And obviously, Covid has stopped me from travelling, so that would have been a big part of my job had we not had a pandemic. But we’re making it work.
Besides being a cloud advocate for Microsoft, you also have a personal blog and do a weekly update on YouTube as Techielass. How do the two intertwine? Do you usually post work-related stuff, separate both worlds, or a mix of both?
I think it’s a bit of both to be honest. Because a lot of people know me as Techielass and from before I was a cloud advocate, through my blog. Some things like my weekly update on YouTube was something that I actually started in anticipation for this job. Because I knew I would have to be on camera or I knew I’d have to do some presentations for this job.
I started that weekly update nearly two years ago now, to basically get more familiar with looking at the camera and being able to connect to it and doing all the things that go around video production and so that that’s kind of interlinked. Although it’s become a kind of side project because I just enjoy doing that kind of medium as well.
My blog is sometimes intertwined with my job. You’ll find me, you know, blogging about random things that I find. I’ve been supporting my husband and working from home lately. So there’s some random support ticket type questions he’s asked me that I’ve blogged about, because I know he’s going to ask me in about 6 weeks’ time. And I’m not going to remember how I did it, so yeah, there’s various different things on my blog.
So yeah, my blog kind of intertwines with my job, but it’s not necessarily always about my job.
Is there anything in particular that you like to blog about within the world of Azure?
I think I’ve tried to specialise in data centre migrations. I think we’ve probably all been involved in an on-prem data centre migration. And I’ve tried to take some of that experience and that knowledge and transfer it into how you would actually migrate to the cloud.
So, you’ll find me talking a lot about migrating. I tend to talk more about the processes around that nowadays rather than the technology because I think that’s a part of the journey that a lot of people struggle with. We can understand the technology quite easily, I think. But trying to put that into practice; how you think about things like training your staff; and how you change that culture within your organization; how do start the project for your migration…
So, I talk a lot about data centre migrations and, although I talk a lot about the culture and the process around it. You’ll find me talking about Azure migrate quite a bit and intertwining that into how you actually do your data centre migration. So that’s kind of my specialty, what a lot of people reach out to me and ask about.
What are the biggest mistakes being made in this data centre migration to the cloud, especially now that some companies might be rushing their transition because of the pandemic?
I think lots of people forget to actually assess what they have inside their on-prem data centre right now. They want to get to the actual delivery part. They want to get to put some resources in Azure, and they want to prove the value and say “we’ve completed that project”. And, like you say, some have been rushing because of Covid and the challenges that it’s thrown up.
I always try and say: take a step back, have a look at what’s in your environment. Try and understand not only the technology in your environment, but also what your staff needs are. So, your technology is going to have a bunch of needs when you move it to the cloud. Things are maybe not even going to be able to be moved to the cloud because they’re legacy. Or they’re far too complex, etc.
But what about the the staff within your environment as well? Do people know how to use Azure once you’ve moved into that? I think it that can often be a stumbling block as well. I’ve seen some customers who bring in third-party companies to do the migration. They move all the technology and then that third-party company leaves. The staff don’t have any clue on how to support the things that are now in Azure.
And before you know it, they’ve got into this situation where they think that the cloud is rubbish. Because the staff haven’t been able to support it because they themselves haven’t been supported in learning it. That’s why I always say that a data centre migration is about technology and people, so make sure you’re investing in the staff within your IT department.
Also, make sure you’re looking towards the end users, the people that use these applications that are in your data centre. Do you know how they use them? Is this an opportunity to ditch some of the ones that they hate? Is it that time to look at new solutions?
So, technology and people are the things you should be thinking about in your data centre migration.
What advice would you give to other IT specialists who might want to get into community relations and advocacy?
If you want to get into the community space, try and do it in your spare time. I know that’s a big ask, because we probably don’t have a lot of spare time, (I definitely don’t have a lot of spare time myself), but it’s definitely a job you have to have a passion for because it’s very different from the technology world, from being a consultant, from being an engineer.
There are so many facets to it. I do things in marketing, I do video editing, I do image creation. I’m a bit of a designer occasionally. I’m also a technical writer. I have to be a presenter.
There’s a ton if things before I even get to the technology. Sme days might I don’t even touch any of the technology because I’m in things like Adobe Creative Cloud, so that’s a big change.
If you’re not ready to give up the toolbox, if you’re not ready to give up playing with the technology. Then it’s not something for you right now, and that’s why I say do it in your spare time, because, if you find that and you enjoy doing these things, if you enjoy doing podcasts, if you enjoy doing videos you enjoy doing the blogging, you’ll naturally find that you’ll progress more and more to that and away from being hands on the tools as such.
I see a lot of people wanting the glamour, but they don’t realise that there’s a lot of time where you’re actually not touching technology. But it is a great job. It has offered me fantastic opportunities , but I think a lot of people need to be aware of the fact that there’s so much to it and it’s not just talking about tech all the time.
And your advice for the larger IT community?
Besides that, just support people who are creating content, whether that be people like myself that do it as a job or whether it be people doing it as a hobby. It definitely means a lot, even if it’s just a small like on a YouTube video or a retweet on Twitter. That means a whole load to us as content creators.
So, definitely support people when they do that, because it can make a massive difference. That 10-minute video could have taken me like 3 days to create so that small little like on a YouTube video means the world to me and it means that I actually spend my time valuably.
When was the last time you took a deep look at your IT recruitment strategy? Summer downtime is the perfect opportunity to build your talent pipeline.
When was the last time you had a chance to properly work on your IT recruitment strategy? Summer brings with it a slowdown in activity for most businesses. Employees, clients and external partners out on vacation; ongoing projects are momentarily put on hold. But good news: you will finally have some time to reflect on how things are going and update your route map.
One of the key steps in this process is conducting a thorough review of your department’s talent strategy. Here are some tips on how to best anticipate your personnel needs and build a solid IT talent pipeline for the months ahead.
Take inventory of your team and outline IT recruitment needs
Firstly, where are your projects in relation to the objectives set? What skills are missing from your team? What specialists can you foresee you will need for the coming months? Take the time to chat with your staff and other department managers, then define your ideal team and the profiles to target based on your available budget.
Talking with individual team members will also provide you with more insight into their personal and professional needs and goals. Another friendly reminder: ensuring that your existing employees are comfortable and have enough room for development is as important as incorporating new talent.
Evaluate potential IT recruitment strategy partners
Summer can also be a good time to prospect recruitment partners and review existing ones for your IT recruitment strategy. It is also important that you take the time to do a deep analysis and avoid making choices in a rush. Choosing the right IT recruiting partner is crucial in today’s ultra-competitive talent market.
When meeting with potential recruiters, make
sure you touch on all the technical specifications of your projects and provide
as much information on your business as possible. Although a good recruiter
will have a good base understanding of your industry and needs, the better you
communicate, the more productive your relationship will be.
Think also of the kind of professional that
you need. If you are looking for mainly freelance technical profiles, for
example, you are better off orienting yourself towards a specialized player who
knows well the talent market you are targeting.
Take advantage of a less competitive
talent market
Okay: many candidates are on vacation. But
recruiters too! This means fewer companies competing for top talent.
Moreover, it is a good idea to start your search in the months of July-August, especially if you are looking for rare or “short-term” profiles. These positions tend to be fewer in number and will require more time.
In the case of freelancers, many independent
consultants are looking for assignments to start with the school year (or even
before) and are likely to be in active search during the Summer months.
Plan your onboardings before for the
start of the school year
In addition, keep in mind that things quickly pick up the pace at the end of the Summer. The September rush will probably not give you much time to prepare the reception of future members of your team. Therefore, take advantage of this in-between period to review your onboarding process as a whole and outline a cohesive standard procedure.
Whether they are permanent or temporary employees, new recruits must be properly introduced to the company and integrated into the team. Do not neglect the transmission of information and the provision of all the necessary equipment, tools and resources.
Dr. ir Johannes Drooghaag talks about the real human element behind cyber attacks and his work helping educate children and parents about cyber security.
Dr. ir Johannes Drooghaag; CEO of Spearhead Management and founder of Internet Safety for Kids; recently sat down with us to talk about the real human element behind cyber attacks. His work helping educate children and parents about cybersecurity.
How did your career in tech start? What do you do these days?
My career started in applied information technology and I my interest was first in the technical part of that. But I lost interest when I noticed that technology keeps rotating and innovating and reinventing itself so fast that it’s very difficult to keep up. And I started to get very interested in how can we build bridges; with the people using the technology and how they can they keep up with this enormous pace of technology.
That was more than 30 years ago and, since then, the pace has only increased. But we have not really done a lot to improve how we educate people with technology. So that became my mission. I focus mainly on the human element of technology, and I do that in the field of cybersecurity, of agile management, for digital transformation. We say it is all customer-focused, which in most cases is true. But, in many cases, we forget the people within the organisation who have to work with all that technology.
How do you advocate for this human-centred approach to technology?
I founded a company called Spearhead Management, in which we literally take, first of all, the people. We start with education and coaching, and we do that based on an approach that we could call a gap analysis. Where are we today? Where do we want to be tomorrow? And yes, there will be technology involved. But how can we enable and empower the people in the organisation to make that happen and to become part of that innovation and that digital transformation. And we do that through training. We do that through consulting, through coaching.
I also use my voice on social media. I started to actively use social media three years ago. I’ve been growing fortunately very fast in the last three years. I use that a lot to point out what the human element behind cyber attacks is. What has gone very well? What has gone not so well? And what has gone really, really bad?
And one of the things I do with my team is that, once a year, we publish a report called The Human Element in Cyber Security, and I do podcasts and keynotes around it under the title “The Human Elements in Cyber Security: And It’s Not What You Think.”
Why is it not what we think?
Because when we look at the IT community, there’s a lot of focus on the user error. So you might get the impression that the user is responsible for all cyber incidents. And when we look at the media, we get all the information about the bad fenders, about the vulnerabilities, about how somebody was hacked and everything went wrong.
But when we look at the technical information about these cyber breaches, we see that more than the human element caused 80% of them in the configuration and the management of technology, so the technical responsibility behind that technology. Now we should not take that and do the same thing by saying, the IT experts are to blame because that’s not fair nor correct.
A lot of that is leadership decisions. We know in a corporation nothing happens without approval and budget. So, the IT guy can sit there and say “I have to update those machines, I have to replace that software because it’s EOL”. But when that person doesn’t get approval and doesn’t get the budget. I assume they’re not going to pay that out of their own pocket, right?
So the human element is a lot more than just the actual making failures. The majority of that is leadership. The majority of that is completely failed risk management. If we don’t change the way we manage and lead, we will continue to have these issues.
What would be a textbook example of leadership failure impacting cybersecurity?
There is this beautiful case of the colonial pipeline, a very high-profile case that was recently all over the media. It started with all kinds of theories about what would have been the case. And this theory immediately emerged that people were claiming that a user had opened an attachment. Other people claimed that there had been a case of social engineering through which all kinds of other theories popped up. Things popped up and they were all over the media and social media.
But then the actual experts analysed it. They found that a VPN account, which lacked basic security measures and was not in use for a very long time got compromised. Some one shared that compromised account, including the ID and password, on dark web forums. And used that account for the initial breach of the network and through that they were able to escalate.
Now there’s one thing that we have to keep in mind. There’s an FBI director who made a very interesting statement. There are two types of companies. The companies who have had their network breached by malicious actors. And the companies who do not know that their network has been breached by malicious actors. And that’s the reality that we have to assume at the moment. That we are compromised and that we must implement all potential and available countermeasures based on that assumption.
The colonial pipeline case shows us two things we should focus on. Firstly, abandoned technology. That VPN connection that we are not monitoring, not taking care of and that hasn’t been used for a long, long time: it is still open and available. Secondly, the almost mandatory segregation of network access and segmentation of the network itself to make sure that you cannot simply hop from one privilege to the next one. All that was not available. Your active monitoring, through which you keep an eye on what happens in your network. If, after five years, you suddenly see a VPN connection pop up, you should react to that. Never happened.
For me, that is a schoolbook example of knowing what should be done and not doing that. An example of having all kinds of interpretations that are not factual at the beginning of the incident and, as soon as the actual analysis is publicly known, is once again the basic step.
And that is what we see in the majority of our research as the real human element behind cyber attacks. When we follow the three basic elements of cybersecurity (patch management, access management, segmentation and segregation), we can prevent more than 90% of all cyber incidents.
You are the founder of Internet Safety for Kids. Can you tell us a bit about this initiative?
We create videos and content to enable parents and children to use the Internet in a secure and responsible manner. We do that with videos and cartoons. The kids love it. We get wonderful feedback, and the most interesting part is that parents write us to tell us that they’re learning from the videos, which they thought were intended for the kids, but we make them on purpose for the kids and the parents. It’s a beautiful project. I love it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth every hour that we invest in it.
What sort of cybersecurity advice do you provide in these videos?
Well, there was one episode for which the kids made the entire script from beginning to end.
They said “We have some wonderful advice: we need to inform our parents about what we do, and we should never hide what we do, and we should always explain why we want to do it. But can you please be so kind as to tell the parents that they should listen when we want to tell them something? And if we want to show them something, that they should actually take a couple of minutes?”
So we did this episode created by the kids alone and we didn’t allow the parents to criticise any of it, just focused on saying “Hey parents: yes, we can tell you what the kids should do, but you should have time for them when they want to do what we tell them to do.”
I love that so much. We had so much fun creating that. We encourage parents and kids to learn this together. It’s not that parents give these videos to the kids and say “well, be busy and learn this.” Sit down together, learn this together and use it as an input for discussions with each other. What we’ve learned with the kids is that they’re really actively involved, so they come back to the parents and they say, “hey, I watched this video and look, I’ve done this and it looks good.” And that’s the coolest thing.
What is the role of the CRM consultant or expert? Discover in their job description their missions, skills, training and salary.
Use our template to create a compelling and comprehensive CRM Consultant job description to attract top talent.
What is the role of the CRM consultant or expert? How to become a CRM consultant? What are the required skilled and the salary expectation? We tell it all in our CRM consultant job description.
Are you looking for IT mission opportunities in the Tech and IT sectors on a freelance or permanent basis? Mindquest can help you find your next IT mission opportunity. Find CRM missions by browsing our freelance and permanent vacancies available on our digital recruitment platform.
CRM consultant: the job description
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) consultant; otherwise known as a CRM expert; is a specialist in customer relationship management software and customer relationship itself. When creating a call center, this professional assists in optimizing the relationship with customers. But also in making decisions relating to the choice of IT tools. Usually, a CRM expert works for an ESN or a BtoB agency. They can work in a large group or in small structures and is mainly required to work in collaboration with customer service, as well as with the marketing and web-marketing service.
The role of the CRM consultant is to define, configure, implement and manage the CRM software while promoting its positive impact on the company’s strategy. CRM Software is the backbone of any call centre. Indeed, the CRM software makes it possible to keep all the history of exchanges with customers and to manage the call lists on a daily basis. In choosing which CRM to implement, they can choose between independent CRM software or an ERP (including other business management modules). They manage the CRM software on a daily basis. That is to say, they take care of monitoring developments and finding new improvement strategies. Furthermore, they also collect data concerning customers and their life cycle, and carry out reports.
The CRM consultant is also focused on determining the best strategies to increase customer loyalty and engagement. This professional thus sets up loyalty campaigns and works to understand which are the dissatisfied customers (detractors) and satisfied customers (promoters) by calculating the NPS score (Net promoter score).
Required Skills
How to become a CRM consultant? The CRM consultant must have a perfect command of software packages dedicated to CRM. He or she must also possess solid knowledge in the areas of sales and marketing. Specializing in customer data analysis, it is important that he or she has knowledge and skills in data mining and brand optimization on search engines and social networks. The CRM consultant must demonstrate good analytical skills and be responsive to any changes they need to be able to detect. This professional must know how to approach a project as a whole.
A true specialist in customer relations, it is important that they know all the technical and strategic aspects. In addition, the CRM consultant must have a taste for contact, good listening skills and a sense of service. It is essential that the CRM consultant has a great spirit of synthesis and good adaptability.
How much does a CRM consultant make? The salary of a CRM consultant varies depending on the experience of the consultant. But also depending on the scope of their position and the size of the company. Indeed, some CRM consultants only work on the software aspect, while others will be responsible for a large part of the customer relationship.
Within a large group or small business, the salary range for this professional is wide. Generally speaking, a CRM consultant can earn close to €35,000 / year at the start of a career. At the end of his career, he can hope to earn more than €65,000 / year as a senior. The average salary of this professional is around €45,000 per year. The average daily rate for a CRM consultant developer is generally between $400 and $900.
Different training courses allow you to become a CRM consultant, with a Bac + 4 or Bac + 5. Graduates from business or engineering schools are usually highly appreciated by employers. It is thus possible to enter a business school or an engineering school, with a diploma with a specialization in marketing or web marketing. You can take a Master in Marketing or International Marketing or join a communication or marketing school. There are also certifications for using software that are popular with employers, such as Salesforce certifications.
Find CRM assignments on our freelance and permanent IT recruitment platform, or join Mindquest so you don’t miss out on any CRM assignments!
John Lunn, aka Johnnychipz, discusses the benefits of being an active member of the Azure community and how he learned Azure IoT.
John Lunn, also known as Jonnychipz, is a Welsh Azure MVP and MCT working as a technical architect at BT Enterprise. An organiser of the Welsh Azure User Group and an avid vlogger, John discusses the benefits of being an active member of the Azure community and how he learned Azure IoT.
What made you go into Microsoft Technologies and cloud architecture?
think when you go into business you predominantly work with Microsoft Technologies, more often than not. I kind of cut my teeth in IT on that side of the fence, which was very much Microsoft focused. So, I guess that, when I took that additional career step into the world of consultancy and kind of specialized in a particular area; in my case it was unified comms when I first started in that world; Microsoft was a natural steppingstone.
I’ve dealt with it for a number of years now. I knew my way around it. I was comfortable with it. So developing those softer skills like peaking to customers and other clients and helping other people understand the technology, or yeah, or being parachuted into a completely burning disaster of a problem. You soon learn the technologies at quite a deep level. You learn quite quickly what you can and can’t do.
So, yeah. I suppose I kind of edged myself gently into the world of consultancy and architecture. Now I find myself as a technical architect working on predominantly Azure and Microsoft focused solutions for customers. It’s been quite a long career and I’ve delved into a number of different areas. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. I’ve learned so much throughout that time.
Cloud careers are evolving very rapidly. What’s your approach to keeping up with emerging trends?
As an individual, I’m constantly thinking: where are we going with technology? What’s next? Not just for my own interests and keep the passion and the interest in my career. But also: where can I add the most value? The company that I work for — how can I help them see and visualise those innovative ideas, projects and solutions?
For a number of years, I’ve been speaking internally with my management team, talking about where we’re going as an industry, and, clearly, for some time now, it’s been around IoT, edge data, machine learning, AI… All of those kinds of technologies that are going to drive innovative solution design.
So, I’ve been on a personal quest. I’ve dabbled in areas over the years. I’ve done bits and pieces and I keep telling people I know enough to be dangerous. That’s my stock answer. I know enough to dig in and make a little bit of noise. But I take it at my own personal development journey to try and dig into that in a bit more detail. IoT was one of those areas that I jumped into.
Why Azure IoT in particular? How did you go about diving into the area?
I guess I wanted to understand right the way from that physical thing. That physical device and object, the microcontroller that is inside that device, to the LEDs and resistors and buttons. How do those things get made and then what is the code that sits on that microprocessor? How do I develop that code to then enable me to take that sensor information?
Maybe there’s, you know, some optical, temperature or humidity sensor. The common things that you find in IoT projects. How do I take that, read it with some code and send that up to this thing called the cloud? And then what do I do with that?
So, I took it upon myself to try and look at some pet projects to build this, to start looking at microcontrollers, put them in, etc. I literally got myself a 3D printer and started printing off all these random designs I made myself.
There’s the engineering mentality if you’re really starting off at the maker side of things. So, I went on this journey of learning all of these kinds of disciplines. It’s really about understanding all of these little components that go into what makes an IoT solution. And I’m really trying to understand how you join the dots between these various features and components within Azure to make those solutions.
And it’s been, more of a labour of love than anything for work. I’ve met some fantastic people out in the community that have helped me understand things, that I’ve learned from, that I’ve taken ideas from.
And going down on that journey, you learn so much about those areas of Azure that maybe you’re not using on a frequent basis. You know, you start with this high-level view of the world. I try and dig down deep as much as I can in as many different areas so that hopefully I get a little bit more of a clearer picture as to how and why you can use these things.
Do you think a hands-on approach to learning new technologies is better than a theoretical or certifications-based one?
I mean everybody is different. I think for me hands-on works well. Certification is a great way to go, especially if it’s something relatively new and unknown.
So, for example, the AZ 220 exam is the Azure IoT developer speciality exam from Microsoft. And that’s what I was going for at the time.
There are certain ways people can study for exams as Azure IoT exam AZ 220. It’s very much theory-based where you read the Microsoft docs and understand things. And you know, if you do enough Microsoft exams, you can kind of work out which questions they are going to ask you. You get to learn in an almost parrot-like fashion the areas that particular exam is going to cover. And that’s great, there have been exams where I’ve kind of just done in that way. You go in and you’ve learned something over a crammed week or two.
But the problem is that, later down the road, if you’ve not actually done anything physical or hands-on or done it yourself, I found that I forgot it.
For the Azure IoT exam, I took it relatively slowly because I wanted to absorb it and be part of it for a while. Basically, because it was so much fun. I was just having so much fun doing this tinkering and making and, like I say, it hasn’t stopped.
So yeah, I think certification; as Azure IoT exam; is definitely a great way of identifying the areas that you need to learn. But how you learn those is up to you. Everybody’s got their own style and, for me, slow and steady and hands-on sinks in more and I’m able to retain that information for longer and apply it to other things.
You are an active member of the online Azure community. You go by the nickname of Jonnychipz, and you blog and host a weekly vlog covering Azure-related news and topics. How did you become such an active part of the community? What were the beginnings like?
I had always been on the periphery, the edges of the community. And I guess I never really understood what community meant. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to go to some great Microsoft events globally, and I’ve met some brilliant people. But I had never really been actively involved in the community.
But then COVID hit, and we were all locked up in our houses. I got the time to actually focus and build myself a little bit of an office space. Before, I was always out on the road, driving up and down motorways in the UK or running the kids around.
So, as we all had this additional time, I thought, OK, this is an opportunity for me to try and focus on public learning and the community a bit more. In hindsight, I didn’t really know what I was doing when I first started. I set a blog up and it was jonnychips.com, you know? And I started putting out some blogs. I started doing the 100 days of cloud, just trying to show my public learnings and hopefully give a bit back.
What does your new role in the community bring into your life? What have been the best moments so far?
Well, it sounds a bit cliched, but there have been so many different situations that were super fun and where I thought I would have never been I had not turned to the community. Things like joining and setting up and helping organise a user group – part of what I do is helping organise the Welsh Azure User Group, and we run that as a monthly virtual session.
We’ve had so many fun moments over that, just from the guys and gals that help organise the weekly or biweekly calls that we have, through to the events themselves and just the fun engagement from other people in the community. There’s been so many comedy moments and just good general laughs over things.
IoT has been one of the standout things for me. The people I’ve met in in the world of IoT, from members of the community through to the advocacy team at Microsoft themselves, I’ve managed to speak to one or two of those over the last few months. They’re all super people. Really clever, intelligent, passionate people just putting stuff out.
You forge these new friendships without you realising it. You’re virtually speaking to people across Twitter and you’re having that banter, you jump on a live Twitch stream and have a little bit of fun.
So, it’s probably safe to say that there’s not really been one best moment so far. I think the best is yet to come. I’m really looking forward to getting back to the face-to-face meetups, getting back out there to two events where I get to meet some of these great people and hopefully have a coffee or a beer and a bit of lunch or something with them. I see that being a super fun time.
