Mark Allan
Software engineer, Microsoft MVP
Belfast, United Kingdom
Mark is a software engineer and Microsoft MVP and has learnt his trade from 35 years of mistakes. He's an expat Mancunian (red half) but has lived in his adopted home of Northern Ireland for nearly half his life.
He's been a professional developer since the 1980s, mostly freelance, and has worked on a myriad of projects for everything from local startups and councils to multinational corporations and federal government departments. In search of a quieter life, he now works full time for Gearset in their Belfast office.
While something of a technology omnivore, particularly if it's new and shiny, he currently tends towards React front-ends sitting on top of scalable cloud-first services, using a functional, event-driven and reactive approach. He's also a big advocate of the DevOps mindset.
In his spare time he's a STEM Ambassador, CoderDojo mentor, Barefoot volunteer and organiser of the Northern Ireland Developer Conference.
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Thinking thunks: adopting React and Redux
We've recently started migrating from a legacy web UI framework to React and Redux. Find out how we're approaching it, and some of the lessons we've learned digging into the weeds of hooks, state management, middleware and thunks.
Azure Container Apps - App hosting made easy
K8s without the H8s :)
Kubernetes is powerful and flexible, but it's not famously easy to look after. Serverless functions have a low barrier of entry, but you have to work within the constraints of your chosen platform.
So what if there was a fully managed application-centric platform that's easy to configure yet can host any code regardless of runtime or programming model and comes with baked-in features for running modern serverless and distributed services? And doesn't even lock you in?
Join us to learn about Azure Container Apps, bringing Kubernetes and serverless computing to the masses. Then watch as we discover how easy it is to put together a modern serverless event-based application with a distributed state store. In Fortran.
Real world Azure Static Web Apps
Static Web Apps brings serverless websites to Azure. They can be much cheaper, faster and more secure than standard sites, but to get the same functionality you do need to approach things a little differently than you may be used to.
In this session you'll learn about the features and advantages of Static Web Apps and find out how to get started. But you'll also get a practical demonstration from somebody who's built several such sites of how to migrate from the traditional ways of doing things to the new paradigm introduced to Azure by Static Web Apps.
Microsoft Ignite | The Tour London
Session - "Hosting and Scaling Service-Based Applications on Azure"