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Speaker

Brian McKeiver

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

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • .NET
  • .net framework
  • ASP .NET Core
  • Azure App Configuration
  • Azure App Service
  • Azure Search
  • azure static web app
  • kentico
  • CMS
  • headless cms
  • kontent
  • Soft Skills
  • Leadership
  • Business Growth
  • Digital Marketing
  • dxp
  • Content Management

Azure OpenAI in Action

Azure’s OpenAI service allows developers to apply large language models and generative AI to a variety of use cases. It represents a transformative approach to AI development. By leveraging Microsoft's powerful cloud infrastructure, it demystifies complex AI processes. Most importantly it allows you to bring your own data to the party.

Join the session to see how this service, along with tools like Azure OpenAI Studio and Azure ML Studio, makes AI development accessible and manageable for us all. See how it is a platform designed to bridge the gap between theoretical AI and practical implementation. Leave knowing how to ground AI with your own data and add it into your own applications.

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 building 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.

Michigan Technology Conference 2024 Sessionize Event

March 2024 Pontiac, Michigan, United States

Beer City Code 2023 Sessionize Event

August 2023 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

KCDC 2023 Sessionize Event

June 2023 Kansas City, Missouri, United States

SciFiDevConMayTheFourthEvent 2023 Sessionize Event

May 2023

Kontent Horizons

Delivering on the Promise of AI

November 2022 New York City, New York, United States

Microsoft Ignite 2022

State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search

October 2022 Seattle, Washington, United States

Atlanta Developers' Conference 2022 Sessionize Event

September 2022 Marietta, Georgia, United States

Beer City Code 2022 Sessionize Event

August 2022 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

Nebraska.Code() 2022

Supercharged Static Sites in .NET with Statiq + Azure

July 2022 Lincoln, Nebraska, United States

dev up 2022 Sessionize Event

June 2022 St. Louis, Missouri, United States

THAT Conference 2022

State-of-the-art Search with Azure Cognitive Search

May 2022 Round Rock, Texas, United States

Global Azure 2022 Sessionize Event

May 2022

SciFiDevConMayTheFourthEvent Sessionize Event

May 2022

Granite State Code Camp 2021 Sessionize Event

November 2021 Manchester, New Hampshire, United States

Code PaLOUsa 2021 Sessionize Event

August 2021

Global Azure 2021 Sessionize Event

April 2021

philly.NET Code Camp 2021 Sessionize Event

January 2021

Code PaLOUsa 2020 Sessionize Event

August 2020 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

philly.NET Code Camp 2020.1 Sessionize Event

April 2020 Malvern, Pennsylvania, United States

Orlando Codecamp & Tech Conference 2020 Sessionize Event

March 2020 Sanford, Florida, United States

Code PaLOUsa 2019 Sessionize Event

August 2019 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

Beer City Code 2019 Sessionize Event

May 2019 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

philly.NET Code Camp 2019.1 Sessionize Event

April 2019 Malvern, Pennsylvania, United States

Philly.Net Code Camp 2019.1

Let's Take a Tour of .NET Core: CLI,

April 2019 Malvern, Pennsylvania, United States

THAT Conference 2019

How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates

March 2019 Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, United States

Prairie.Code() 2019

How to Win Friends and Influence Better Developer Estimates

March 2019 Des Moines, Iowa, United States

Kentico Connection Denver

The Best of Both Worlds

March 2019 Denver, Colorado, United States

Great Lakes Area .Net UG

Optimizing Azure App Services

March 2019 Southfield, Michigan, United States

Code PaLOUsa 2018

How to Build an E-commerce Chatbot

March 2018 Louisville, Kentucky, United States

Little Rock Tech Fest

Build an Open Data .Net MVC site in 30 mins

March 2018 Little Rock, Arkansas, United States

Chicago .Net Users Group

Build an E-commerce Chatbot

March 2018 Downers Grove, Illinois, United States

Code on the Beach 2018

Build an E-commerce Chatbot (MS BotFramework)

March 2018 Atlantic Beach, Florida, United States

CodeMash

Slaying the Headless CMS Jabberwocky,

January 2017 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

Chicago Coder Conference

Search Bogging you Down? Move it to the Cloud

July 2016 Chicago, Illinois, United States

404 Conference

Good, Better, Best Website Performance Optimization

June 2016 Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

South Florida Code Camp

AMP up your Site with Accelerated Mobile Pages

January 2016 Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States

GR Dev Day

Search Bogging You Down? Move it to the Cloud!

January 2016 Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States

Kentico Partner Summit

To RFP or not to RFP

November 2015 Arlington, Virginia, United States

Kentico Connection Orlando

Growth Hacking with Kentico

October 2015 Orlando, Florida, United States

Kentico Connection Brno

How To Wield Kentico 9 in the Real World

October 2015 Brno, Czechia

DogFoodCon 2015

Integrate & Automate Enterprise CMS Deployments

March 2015 Columbus, Ohio, United States

Kentico Connection Prague

Harness the Power of Marketing Automation

October 2014 Prague, Czechia

Kentico Connection Boston

- Upgrade like a Pro, Boston, MA

October 2014 Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Brian McKeiver

Microsoft Azure MVP; Co-Owner at BizStream

Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States