Sorry, who are you again?

My name is David and I am a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) at Microsoft in the UK which means I spend all of my time travelling to see different customers teaching them about Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com). I specialize in two main areas:

  1. Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is Microsoft’s competitor product to EC2 from Amazon for hosting Windows and Linux machines in the cloud. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/services/virtual-machines/ for getting started.
  2. Azure IoT Suite which is a collective name for a number of different components which can easily be plugged together to build backend processing applications for embedded hardware such as Raspberry PI, Arduino or any device which has some form of networking capability and can be programmed to send and receive data. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/develop/iot/ for more information.

Over the coming weeks and months I’m going to start blogging about some of these technologies I work with and how to get started using these as quickly and simply as possible. Whilst there are already lots of really good videos and sets of documentation out there, customers in a corporate setting don’t always have the time to sit down and work all things out for themselves. Oftentimes they want either somebody to visit them and either just tell them what they need to know or at least point out the good learning materials so they can get working as soon as possible. My job as a PFE involves working with customers who operate in exactly this way.

In subsequent posts you’ll find a number of what I’m going to call “Learning Guides” – these are blog posts which guide you through the process of learning a new technology and most importantly building some working demos. The guides will have just the information you need to get started with nothing more and certainly no sales pitch.

I’m not going to presume any previous knowledge however I will point you off to other resources if that makes most sense.