Brian McKeiver
Microsoft Azure MVP; Co-Owner at BizStream
Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States
Brian McKeiver is Co-Owner at BizStream, digital agency in Allendale, MI. At BizStream he is a solution architect, visionary, Microsoft Azure MVP, Kentico Xperience MVP, and Kontent.ai MVP. He has over 20 years of experience leading his agency of more than 35 employees, about a hundred clients spread out across North America, and one heck of an interesting story of how it all started from a two-person team. In addition to his expertise in web development, cloud, integration, and digital marketing, Brian is active with the tech community via his blog at Mcbeev.com.
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Avoid the App-ocalypse with Azure Load Testing
What happens to websites or applications that suddenly receive large amounts of traffic? Do they keep chugging along like nothing is happening? Or do they suffer, meltdown, and eventually crash and burn. Think about the last production application that you maintained, would you know the answer to that question? Wouldn't you want to know?
Load testing is one way to prevent this "app-ocalypse". Performing this type of testing is a crucial step in ensuring that a website or application can handle scaling to meet demand. By simulating real-world usage scenarios, load testing helps us identify potential bottlenecks. It can help us optimize our systems for higher levels of efficiency. Azure Load Testing is a cloud-based service that does just that. It allows developers to test website performance under duress.
In this talk, we'll delve into the ins and outs of Azure Load Testing. You'll learn how to set up and configure load tests, analyze results, and identify areas for improvement. We'll also cover some real world techniques that I've used in my projects. Attendees will leave with a solid understanding of how to use Azure Load Testing to ensure their websites and/or mobile apps are ready to handle high levels of traffic and remain stable under pressure.
High Availability with Azure PaaS for Websites
Let's review how to accomplish highly available architecture for modern websites in Azure. We will see how to leverage PaaS based resources like Azure Front Door, Azure App Services, Azure SQL Databases, and other Azure resource types that allow sites to scale, be more fault tolerant, and ultimately provide more uptime.
This session is for developers and end clients who want to leverage Azure to host their sites in a modern way.
Headless CMS Architecture Patterns
Using a Headless and API-First approach comes with a problem. With only an API (or multiple) to start with, how do you know you are budling your project codebase ("head") to account for best practices such as caching, security, and best performance. How do you know what path offers to allow for the most flexibility with the least amount of headaches? It isn't the same as just having a database and template engine on the backend.
SaaS based Headless solutions are a powerful way to build modern enterprise class websites. They are also becoming more popular by the day.
Luckily, multiple solutions have now been built around these "API first" platforms. Some best practice architecture patterns have emerged as a result, and this session aims to share them. Attendees will see and learn these patterns for designing, building, and deploying Headless based solutions.
Leave the session with proven architecture patterns and how to apply them when working with a Headless CMS and API first stack.
Supercharged Static Sites in .NET with Statiq + Azure
In this session we will walk through how to build a static site using Statiq, Github, and Azure that is much more than just delivering simple HTML.
Need an API? editable content? authorization? CI/CD? Check check and check. I'll show you to make that static site dynamic with Azure functions, Headless CMS, modern tooling, and Azure Static Web Apps.
Leave this session knowing how you can use your .NET / C# skills to build a blazing fast site that costs almost nothing to run and is a joy to work with.
State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search
We all know that providing a good search experience for website visitors is hard. Everyone expects it to “just” work like Google or Amazon. Maybe there is a better way, maybe we fix this with a little help from some AI.
Join the session to see how you can leverage Cognitive Services with Azure Cognitive Search in your apps. With the newly minted semantic search abilities this technology can provide results that are semantically closer to the intent of original query. For example, can you your search return the right results for a query like "in the last 5 years" or will it just return matches based on those 5 words without any context.
You will also learn how to enhance and enrich search through Cognitive Service Skills like natural language processing, image analysis, entity recognition capabilities. Don't know what those are? Well that's not a problem because you will find out.
You can expect to walk away knowing how to generate your own enrichment pipeline that leverages the power of AI to solve your search woes. Why not use the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack that Bing and Office have used for more than a decade into your site? Maybe AI can make it "just" work.
How to Win Friends and Influence...Better Developer Estimates
Let's face it, creating estimates for tasks is not an exact science. Whether it is points, hours, level of effort, or whatever else the next fad is, it all mostly boils down to what feels like a shot in the dark.
Join my session to find out a few lessons learned, tips, tricks, and strategies for creating accurate and timely estimates on your developer tasks. I'll share my experiences for creating the majority of estimates at my company for the past 18 years. I'd estimate that the amount of estimates I have created is more than 500 or so...see what I did there?
At the end of the day, if you can create better estimates, than maybe your project managers will end up becoming another one of your long time friends.
KCDC 2023 Upcoming
Kontent Horizons
Delivering on the Promise of AI
Microsoft Ignite 2022
State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search
Nebraska.Code() 2022
Supercharged Static Sites in .NET with Statiq + Azure
THAT Conference 2022
State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search
Philly.Net Code Camp 2019.1
Let's Take a Tour of .NET Core: CLI,
THAT Conference 2019
How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates
Prairie.Code() 2019
How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates
Kentico Connection Denver
The Best of Both Worlds
Great Lakes Area .Net UG
Optimizing Azure App Services
Code PaLOUsa 2018
How to Build an E-commerce Chatbot
Little Rock Tech Fest
Build an Open Data .Net MVC site in 30 mins
Chicago .Net Users Group
Build an E-commerce Chatbot
Code on the Beach 2018
Build an E-commerce Chatbot (MS BotFramework)
CodeMash
Slaying the Headless CMS Jabberwocky,
Chicago Coder Conference
Search Bogging you Down? Move it to the Cloud
404 Conference
Good, Better, Best Website Performance Optimization
South Florida Code Camp
AMP up your Site with Accelerated Mobile Pages
GR Dev Day
Search Bogging You Down? Move it to the Cloud!
Kentico Partner Summit
To RFP or not to RFP
Kentico Connection Orlando
Growth Hacking with Kentico
Kentico Connection Brno
How To Wield Kentico 9 in the Real World
DogFoodCon 2015
Integrate & Automate Enterprise CMS Deployments
Kentico Connection Prague
Harness the Power of Marketing Automation
Kentico Connection Boston
- Upgrade like a Pro, Boston, MA