Global Azure Bootcamp (GAB) is a one day world-wide event, driven by Microsoft Azure experts and community enthusiasts, to help developers new to Azure as well as experienced developer, to learn and share knowledge about Azure. 2015 marks the 3rd year for this event with 183 worldwide locations to host the event on the same date, on April 25th, 2015.


While this is the first year we hosted the GAB event at Santiago Canyon College (SCC), this is the 2nd time we hosted similar event to serve the academic as well as the general developer community in Southern California. In May of 2014, we hosted the \\publish\ event at SCC, working with Microsoft product team, a global hackathon with more than 60 worldwide event locations, to assist new as well as experienced developers to develop, complete and publish their Windows Phone and Windows Store apps.


Big Thank You to Von Lawson and Ron Kessler at Santiago Canyon College. The GAB event at SCC would not have been possible without the help from these two individuals.


  • Von Lawson – Von is the Dean of Business and Career Technical Education at Santiago Canyon College. He enthusiastically supported this event.

  • Professor Ronal P Kessler, Ph.D. – Professor Kessler teaches computer science, programming, and robotics at Santiago Canyon College. He uses Lego, Boe-Bot and other robots in his C# & C++ cources to make learning engaging and fun. Professor Kessler help initiated the process of hosting the Global Azure Bootcamp at SCC.

In addition to Von and Ron, the following individuals provided great support on a short notice. Their participation was a strong contributing factor to the event's success:


  • David Jones – David delivered presentation to the Global Azure Bootcamp attendees at SCC, remotely from Australia and provided hands on lab exercises to help attendees learn valuable knowledge. As part of his presentation and preparation for the hands on lab contents, David spent many hours of his time to develop and refine the information, lab exercises to help attendees.

    Formerly an academic in computer engineering at RMIT University in Australia, David has 17 years of teaching experience. After leaving his teaching role in December of 2006, David has been working with key commercial companies, provides software training and consulting services. As part of his active role in the community, Microsoft awarded the Most Valuable Professional recognition to David since 2013.


  • Thierry Joubert – David delivered presentation to the Global Azure Bootcamp attendees at SCC, remotely from Paris and talk about development opportunities and trends result from the convergence of Internet-of-Things and Cloud computing market trend.

    As CTO and co-founder of THEORIS, a well-respected software technology company known for its expertise in embedded, real-time, Virtual and Augmented Reality development, Thierry is responsible for a sizable engineering business that keep him extremely busy. Yet, he finds time and has been actively engaging in academic and developer community activities and received the Most Valuable Professional recognition from Microsoft since 2007, for 8 consecutive years.


  • Paolo Patierno – Paolo delivered presentation to the Global Azure Bootcamp attendees at SCC, remotely from Italy and talk about Azure Event Hub, one of the important technology that enables Mobile application to be able to interact with large pool of user and able to scale dynamical on an as needed basis, which enable developer to deliver Mobile application with ability to serve 10 of millions of user without the need to have large invest in IT infrastructure.

    Paolo work as a senior software engineer on embedded systems, mobile, Internet of Things, M2M communication and device to cloud connection. Paolo created a number of useful software libraries, which he release to the community as open-source project that have been use by thousands of developer around the world, such as the M2Mqtt project, a .NET library for MQTT, an open communication protocol for resource constrained Internet-of-Things device.


  • Vishal Saxena – Vishal help co-organize the event and deliver two presentation sessions with great value to the attendees, Azure fundamentals and Dev Ops. We reached out to Vishal for help in less than 3 week from the day of event. He gladly accepted and jump right in to help.

    Vishal is one of the active contributor to the local Microsoft Azure developer community and organizer for the SoCal Microsoft Azure User Group. Microsoft awarded the Most Valuable Professional recognition to Vishal in 2014, for his contribution to the community.


  • Michael Washington – While he was not able to attend the event, Michael connected us to Grape City, who provided valuable prizes for the event.

    Michael is an active community contributor, received the Most Valuable Professional recognition from Microsoft since 2007.


  • Volunteers – Thomas Wukawitz, and Hayden Donze who are both teaching assistants for Dr. Kessler helped with the event and demonstrations.

Presentation and hands-on lab files from the event is available for download via the following Github repository:

https://github.com/embedded101/GAB2015


Here are some photos from the GAB event at SCC:

Professor Kessler welcome attendees.


Von Lawson, Dean of Business & Career Technical Education, speaking to attendees.


Attendees were paying attention and engaging during remote presentation session.


Some attendees were eager to follow along David's hands on lab exercises.


Vishal Saxena deliver concurrent session in the computer lab, about Azure DevOps.


During lunch break, we were engaging with attendees on different topics while eating.


Attendees actively engaging with remote presenters, asking question through a wireless microphone which we pass around the room.


Summary

While this is the first time we have presenter deliver presentation remotely to an in-person event, Live Meeting service from Microsoft made it possible for us to have interactive communication between the live audience and the presenter, enabling the audience to ask questions and presenter to answer the questions in real-time.


The theme for the Global Azure Bootcamp at Santiago Canyon College is "Azure Enabled IoT Development", which cover two separate yet highly collaborative technical subjects, Azure cloud computing and Internet-of-Things.


Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cloud computing (Azure) are exciting technology trends that already triggered massive business movement globally. Just about every key companies in different region of the world already established business strategy, in preparation to capture opportunities triggered by this massive IoT and Cloud computing mega trend.


Overall, the Global Azure Bootcamp @ SCC provided valuable experience to the attendees to realize new technology trends that trigger new businesses and career opportunities, which many of them did not know or think of, and provided valuable technical information and resources to help them learn and continue to learn after the event.