GitHub Pages: An Often Overlooked Web Platform

GitHub Pages is a highly scalable web host with world class infrastructure, free SSL, and robust workflow tools. And it’s FREE. In this session Mike will explain how to determine if your project is a good fit for GitHub Pages and leave you with enough information to be able to implement from top to bottom. We'll go into the basics of setting up a new site and will cover some built-in functions to add a little dynamicity to your static site. He will show you how to set up a local development environment for you Windows developers out there, several scenarios dealing with different types of publishable content, and we'll look at a few third party services to complement your available toolset.

#RemoteLife

In this talk, Mike will present tips and techniques that he has learned over several years working remotely. We’ll cover what you can do when you have issues staying motivated because you are isolated physically from the rest of your team. We’ll review a few different kinds of communication breakdowns and what you can do if you feel like a second rate employee of the company. We’ll also look at ways to foster a good remote relationship with your manager and co-workers.

Working remotely is culturally becoming a viable option more and more as time passes, increasing by 140% since 2005. There are great opportunities available to people that may feel stuck or restricted geographically. This presentation is aimed at giving you a headstart or boost in your remote life.

Why You Need Some Chocolatey In Your Life

In this presentation Mike will give you an introduction to Chocolatey and show how it can save you the time, hassle, and billable hours that you’re currently wasting on maintaining your Windows machine. We’ll review how you can easily install, uninstall, and update packages on your machine. We’ll also cover how you can contribute to the Chocolatey community by authoring and maintaining packages.

~~Legacy~~ Software

With the rapid pace of technology, it's easy for anyone or any team to quickly fall behind the latest tech trends. However, falling years behind is a completely different story, and can feel like an insurmountable challenge to overcome knowing you can't put your business on hold. In this presentation, Mike will cover cultural and technological issues that can hold a system/team/company behind. He will present ideas on how you can start incrementally adopting modern and healthy practices such as DevOps, automated testing, and upgrading to newer platforms. This is a safe space where we don't need to feel ashamed, and Mike will use scenarios from an inherited ASP.NET WebForms system with no automated tests, time-consuming manual deployments, an out of control error log, and a shortage of developers willing to work on such a system.

The Journey For Zero Downtime Deployments In Azure

Zero downtime deployments is just something people talk about but never actually do, right? Wrong! In this presentation, Mike will highlight the building blocks to enable zero downtime deployments for an ASP.NET application in Azure. He will discuss several dev team practices that contribute to pain-free deployments. He will show patterns in GitHub Actions for deployments. We will touch on using Bicep for Infrastructure As Code, as well as methods for performing database migrations. After this presentation, you should have all the tools you need to improve your deployment process.

This session is a work in progress, and the description may change slightly. However, the general concept will not change.