Michael John Pena
Data and AI Director @ Playtime Solutions | Microsoft MVP
Sydney, Australia
Michael John “MJ” Pena is a passionate engineer and business leader who loves Data and AI. He has been working with cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, blockchain, IoT, and machine learning for over a decade and a half. He is a Microsoft MVP in Azure and an active community contributor to emerging data technologies.
He works as the Data and AI Director at Playtime Solutions, an Australian tech consulting company. He uses technology to create new solutions like data warehouses, real-time analytics, and reports. In his previous life, he held many positions, such as CTO, Solutions Architect, and Technical Lead.
MJ is an entrepreneur who co-founded and raised funding for a venture in Cryptocurrency and mobile development. He is adept at stakeholder management, team leadership, and business operations. MJ is a balanced individual who enjoys outdoor activities with his family, such as biking and running. He is always eager to learn new things and share his knowledge with others.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Lightning Talks
Why Blockchain doesn't make sense - Michael John Pena
Blockchain is more of a Social and Philosophical change rather than technology. That is why often times it doesn't make clear sense to developers and technologists.
This lightning talk will cover the speaker's journey on why Blockchain as a concept doesn't make sense at the beginning. He will then share his experience along the sleepless nights of asking "Why Blockchain?" and came up with some good answers.
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Ask Alexa: How Developers Can Design Engaging Conversations with Voice - Azi Farjad
Join Azi Farjad, Developer Evangelist for Amazon Alexa, as she provides insights on how voice experiences have transformed the way that customers interact with the world around them. This poses a unique challenge for developers to understand design patterns in voice space and to build engaging conversations.
In this session, we look at the experience as a whole and take you through key learnings that you can use when building for voice with Alexa skills. We provide tips of how to create engaging voice experiences for users and will familiarize you with design patterns in voice space. We will also share how to implement the experience with Alexa.
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Build your own GraphQL server in 10 minutes - Ben Teese
GraphQL and its associated frontend libraries like Relay and Apollo Client are now reasonably well known in the industry. However, GraphQL backends are a little less well understood. Whilst there are backend-as-a-service platforms available for applications that are entirely green-field, for the rest of us it’s more than likely that, in order to accomodate all of the intricacies of our business domain and infrastructure, we’ll have to build a GraphQL backend ourselves.
In this presentation I’ll show how it's surprisingly easy to get a basic GraphQL backend up-and-running in 10 minutes. Using the Apollo Server framework as a foundation, I’ll build a backend from scratch to service an existing client. Along the way I’ll introduce the concept of GraphQL resolvers and show how you write them, nest and pass data between them, and support both queries and mutations.
Having got the basics up and running, I’ll then talk about what next steps would be for security and performance, and, for those with an aversion to JavaScript, what server frameworks are available for other languages.
Attendees will leave this presentation with an understanding of the key concepts when building a GraphQL server, and an appreciation of just how easy it can be to get started.
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Building Single Page Applications with ASP.NET Core 2.1 - Jason Taylor
This lightning talk will teach you how to get started building Single Page Applications with React or Angular and ASP.NET Core 2.1. This talk will cover the basics, ensuring that you have a seamless experience from development to production.
Why Blockchain doesn't make sense
Blockchain is more of a Social and Philosophical change rather than technology. That is why often times it doesn't make clear sense to developers and technologists.
This lightning talk will cover the speaker's journey on why Blockchain as a concept doesn't make sense at the beginning. He will then share his experience along the sleepless nights of asking "Why Blockchain?" and came up with some good answers.
Blockchain, Cloud and DevOps
Blockchain is more than just Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, it can be used as a consortium platform for your decentralised distributed systems with immutability by default.
In this session, the speaker will explain and demo how to set up your private Blockchain network in the cloud using Microsoft Azure. It will then be followed up by setting up the build and release pipeline of your "Smart Contracts" in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services).
The session will cover fundamental networking and infrastructure concepts in a private and consortium Blockchain platform. Lastly, the audience will learn some roadmap strategy on how to deploy the contracts on Main (Public) Networks.
Global Azure Sydney 2023 Sessionize Event
Global Azure 2023 Philippines Sessionize Event
WeAreDevelopers Live 2023 (Season 5) Sessionize Event
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