Stacy Cashmore

Tech Explorer DevOps, Omniplan, Netherlands

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Speaker, author, and software developer. Stacy has been developing solutions since the mid-1990s in various companies and industries ranging from facilitating contract jobbing to allowing consumers to close a mortgage without the help of a financial adviser – with lots in between.

She has a passion for sharing knowledge: using storytelling for sharing her experiences to help teams grow in the ways that they develop software and work together and performing live coding demonstrations to inspire others to try new technologies.

Stacy has just published her first book, aimed at helping developers get started building dynamic applications using C#, Azure Functions, and Azure Static Web Apps.

For her effort in the community, Stacy has been awarded the Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies since 2020.

Awards

Area of Expertise

Information & Communications Technology

Topics

Azure
Teamwork
Mental Health
Azure Static Web Apps

Social Anxiety 2.0

Today Stacy and Dennie are joining forces to teach you all about how they experience social anxiety and about their journey living with it.

You are not only going to hear Stacy and Dennie’s personal stories about how they need to live with social anxiety, but you are also getting insights into which techniques and methodologies work for them. And what doesn’t?

By the end of the talk, you know that if you have the same experiences from time to time there are always a lot of people experiencing the same and there are always people to help you on your own journey.

It’s time to end the stigma and start talking about mental health!

Trigger warning: references to unaliving

Azure Static Web Apps for the Enterprise

Azure Static Web Apps. An easy way to get a hobby site into the world for very little cost.

But that's not all they can do! With a few changes to the out of the box experience, and using the standard, paid, tier we can use these Azure Resources in our enterprise architecture!

We will touch upon infrastructure as code, to make reliable deployments to a known environment.

We'll look into how to change the default pipeline to allow unit tests etc for the code, and deploying the same build applications into multiple environments.

Finally, we'll take a look at Custom Authentication - using Auth0 to authenticate and a custom Azure Function to provide the roles for our users.

What Has Public Speaking Ever Done For Us?

Putting together a conference talk, even a 5 minute lightning talk, takes a lot of time and effort.

Hours, days, weeks can be poured into making sure that the talk goes as smoothly as possible. To make sure that as a presenter you know your stuff, but not that it’s an over practiced, robotic delivery.

And that’s before you factor in the time and effort in traveling.

So… Why do we do it? What has public speaking ever done for us. Let’s find out!

Azure Static Web Apps - From Zero to Deployed App In 60 Minutes

We're told that by using services such as Medium, dev.to etc. we are diluting our personal brand. That we should be posting to our own site and building ourselves up. You can, of course, use off-the-shelf applications to do that for you.

Or… You can use it as an exercise to try something new and learn new skills!

In this session, we will look at doing just that! Starting with an empty GitHub repository we are going to make a Blazor WebAssembly application to act as our website. We’ll connect that to an Azure Function that reads posts from a CosmosDB to pass to that site. Then we’ll deploy that to a production Azure Static Web App.

Of course, when developing an application, it’s useful to be able to run it locally. So, we’ll also look at how we can do that with Azure Static Web Apps.

Finally, in order to be able to write new blog posts, we need to be able to authenticate ourselves and provide proper authorization so that this functionality can be added later.

Authenticating in Azure Static Web Apps

So you built your own web app in Blazor WASM. Deployed using Azure Static Web Apps, even added some dynamic content with an Azure Function or two.

But what about making sure that you are you?

Azure Static Web Apps provide simple integration to GitHub, Facebook and Twitter to provide authentication without having to store passwords yourself!

We'll add authentication, look at how to fit this into the developer inner loop with the Static Web App CLI and how to pass the authentication through to your Azure Function!

Finally, we'll look at the flexibility a Standard Tier app provides by swapping out the simple authentication for a custom authentication!

Debugging Static Web Apps

Static Web Apps are a wonderful way of deploying web apps that use a client-side framework, using an Azure Function in order to deliver dynamic content.
In the static web app itself the client and API are proxied so that, to the outside world they appear as one. On our local machines that is not the case... So just how can we debug them easily?
We are going to be setting up a Visual Studio project to allow debugging out of the box.
After that we'll take a tour of the new Static Web App CLI - using a command line tool to replicate the function of the web app itself on our local machine.

From Panic Attacks to Public Speaking - My Journey

Techorama came to the Netherlands for the first time in 2018. The biggest .Net conference in the Netherlands with a host of amazing speakers!

Suffering from severe anxiety it was going to be a tough couple of days, but still, I wanted to go!

This is a story about how a panic attack on day one of the conference, followed by a couple of chance meetings lead me to overcome my fear of flying, travelling and people to speak at my first conference.

Embrace the pitfalls (Our stop start journey to Change)

As developers, we want to work in a modern way, to get fast feedback on what we are building to make sure that we are building the right things in the right way.

However, many companies are still at the start of their journey. Things take longer than we would like to get moving, sometimes change can seem to happen at a glacial pace and whilst you are ready to try and run, others are finding their feet - or even digging in their heels!

In this talk, Stacy will go over some of the pitfalls that have happened to her, and the lessons that she has learned from them. Unfortunately, there are no magic solutions to make the problems go away, but hopefully, you can look at the mistakes she has made and go away to make your own new ones to learn from!

How to really work as a team - from sleepy to strong pair programming

So many people think that pair programming is a boring waste of time and effort. I'm here to explain how our team made it work, and what benefits we got out of it!

I love working in a team, bouncing ideas off each other and using our combined strengths to produce something that as individuals we wouldn't be able to come up with.

One way I like to do this is pair programming. But, when I talk to people about this, I often get told it's a waste of time. That it’s about one person working hard whilst the other looks on, superfluous to the process. And let's face it, most of us have experienced this when trying it out!

But I’m going to show you how we went from this sleepy type of pair programming to being super productive when working with multiple developers at one machine!

Not the one person working, one person staring into space type of pair programming, but actually providing value to each other, making the extra effort worthwhile, and bringing extra benefits to the team as a whole.

Developers and Testers: The Yin and Yang of Software Development

Before us, our heroes: Developer and Tester - locked in a gruesome battle for the ages.
Both desire the ultimate goal of high-quality, well-functioning software.
Why do they wage this war against one another?
Will one reign supreme??
Will they meet their release timeline???
Tune in as part of the audience to hear the epic conclusion!

This is a common story in software development. At least, that's what some people say. To that sentiment, we say it doesn't have to be like this.
There are opportunities for each role to shine, and capacity to consider the risks that concern both parties.

Through personal stories from both the good and the ugly, we will share small experiments with you that you can take back to your team.
With a little mindful communication, a sprinkle of grace, and a healthy helping of transparency, you can initiate the change you want to see on your team, to encourage more effective collaboration.

Together Karen (tester) and Stacy (developer) will tell stories where things went wrong, as well as examples where things went smothly
They'll talk about how to improve the collaboration between the 2 roles
And also give concrete ideas for attendees to implement when they return to their teams