Interview with Jeremy Likness a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft during Microsoft Ignite The Tour in London.
The following video has the complete interview:
Intro
Welcome to community interview episode (1).
Our community interview is all about Standing on the shoulders of giants! This is a metaphor which means “Using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress”.
So, our giant in this episode is Jeremy Likness who has more than 25 years of experience. He is working as Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. Jeremy authored many books. Few examples of Jeremy’s books:
It was really an amazing interview. and here it is:
Mohamed:
Hello everyone! We are here at Microsoft Ignite The Tour in London and I have here Jeremy Likness with me, hello Jeremy! It’s great to have you here.
Jeremy:
Hello! It’s great to be here.
Mohamed:
Thank you. So, first, can you give us an introduction about yourself? What you’re doing?
Jeremy:
Sure, I’m a cloud advocate with Microsoft and what that means for people not familiar with that, is I like to say we focus on three seats that are curating in creating content, connecting with the community and also connecting with engineering back at Microsoft or sort the liaison between developers and engineering so that we can solve Cloud-base problems.
Mohamed:
That’s great, can you give us an introduction about the sessions that you are presenting in this event?
Jeremy:
Sure, so I have two sessions once called MOD30 this is enhancing web applications with cloud intelligence and what the session really focuses on is Serverless technology and commoditized AI. it’s basically being able to extend your applications without having to provision new servers and in some cases being able to add application functionality without even modifying existing App. So, it’s pretty exciting session and then I go from that to about forty which deals with applications in production. So, once you’ve deployed your application. How do you monitor it? How do you track defects? How do you debug the application when there are issues? And when you fix those issues what’s the best way to deploy the fixes out.
Mohamed:
That’s fantastic! So, what is the future of this area? What are your expectations?
Jeremy:
I think we’re going to see several things I think there’s going to be less needed to have a Hodgepodge of different tools to connect through you’re going to see a unified what we call benalla glass to see what’s going on. But I think the biggest change is going to be the application of machine learning and being able to automatically detect anomalies and even provide guidance and in some cases automatically heal issues in production. So, there are some exciting things in the pipeline with diagnostics.
Mohamed:
That’s great! How do you see cloud computing in the past present and in the future in terms of adoption and of business and development?
Jeremy:
Well, if we see the trend, the trend is definitely adoption improving. If you look at the trend of the technology itself, we moved from this idea of taking what it looked like in our data centre, copying that in the cloud, then going to what we call platform as a service. So, we’re actually building a web application. So, why do we even care about the server. Let’s just focus on the application I think you’re going to see that trend continue, where we just have the building blocks of what you need to our business, and that plugs into a framework that creates a successful cloud-based application.
Mohamed:
So, you know we can see now the changes are happening too fast we have a lot of new things. So, the problem is that we don’t even have time to learn everything. So, how about to adapt that? What is your advice? How to keep up and how to cope with that?
Jeremy:
That’s a Tough one, Part of it is the methodology that the company embraces. You know we talk about software development life cycle. I think people recognize that the way you approach software can’t just be constrained to IT and software. As to be a business approach to an agile approach and an iterative approach. And I think you’ll see not just the technology systems being more componentized. So, you can swap in an out new pieces but the business decisions also being more incremental. So, that it’s easier to pick up and adapt to the change. But it’s tough to stay on the leading edge but fortunately, companies are learning how to move at that fast pace.
Mohamed:
And how do you see the change of the job market now and in the next few years?
Jeremy:
You know it’s interesting, because every time we have a new wave of technology come across, there’s a concern that are my skill sets here irrelevant? But what I’ve seen in the market over twenty-five years of being in development, is those positions evolved and what might have been a traditional system administrator who monitored a server in the datacentre, is now an IT ops administrator who’s administering the cloud. Because the systems are fully automated, they still need to be monitored, diagnose, configured correctly, deployed, security is a huge concern. So, I see the job market steadily growing and unique challenges, it’s easier now more than ever to specialize in an area of cloud applications and distinguish yourself as a developer by focusing on a key area.
Mohamed:
That’s great! Well, people reaching out to me asking me, I’m a developer, a QA. or a tester, is that enough? Should I learn anything else? What is your advice for them?
Jeremy:
My advice is, the people I see most successful in their jobs, always understand the bigger picture and one layer deep. So, in other words understanding the overarching needs an approaching technology, not as I want to learn this language, but taking that business-minded approach that there are problems to solve, and how does this language help me solve those problems. I think that’s beneficial. Using a tool is great, understanding how the tool was built, would take you that one step further and give me that extra edge when things go wrong, and you have to diagnose and troubleshoot.
Mohamed:
Yeah, that’s right, so what is your advice for students and fresh graduates? How they can join big companies? What is the road-map for them?
Jeremy:
Well, it’s been a while since I’ve entered the job market myself. But I would say that from being on the hiring side of things. A lot of companies have programs I don’t think they’re hiring so much for this depth of expertise, they don’t expect someone who just graduated to have four years of hands-on experience to point production apps. But the idea is, have you been exposed to the concepts in the technology? Are you passionate and able to learn? So, I think demonstrating an ability to learn, is the key there and I’ll just give you a really quick example, when I have a candidates who are stumped with a question and don’t have an answer, but then they go off and learn that on their own and find a solution and come back and say Hey, I know I didn’t have the answer but yeah, I figured this much out, that shows initiative and goes a long way towards securing that opportunity.
Mohamed:
That’s great! So, what is your golden tip to pass an interview?
Jeremy:
Be genuine be yourself. I think a lot of people try to coach themselves to give the response that the interviewer wants to hear, or they try to cram something that they don’t really know well, your experience is the sum of all the things building up to months before. So, just be genuine, comfortable and don’t be afraid to say I don’t know but I think that and explain how you would figure it out.
Mohamed:
That’s fantastic! So, finally from your experience how to be a high performing professional in a company?
Jeremy:
Being a high performing professional requires focus and prioritization, there are a lot of people I know who have different levels of productivity, the ones are most productive, I don’t think it’s that they’re necessarily smarter in a sense, or that they have tools that other people don’t, but they understand how the really prioritize their time and spend 80% of their time on the 20% that’s most important and then flip flop that, I hate to just use the eighty twenty rule generically. But it’s really about prioritization and realizing. Don’t get stuck in a tunnel and try to make one thing perfect, look at the full stack of a priority to make sure you’re making progress across the board.
Mohamed:
That’s really great! Thank you so much for your time, it was really great to have you here and look forward to seeing you in other events.
Jeremy:
Thank you very much! I appreciate it.
Mohamed:
Thank you.