Author: Tiago Costa

One Week – Speaking in 3 different continents!

Tiago Costa / / Events, Speaking

COVID-19 aside and this has been amazing times! I’m doing all my work remotely, customers are happy and see no difference, but I have to confess that I kind of miss the airport life. I very fortunately to work in the IT industry and even more working on Microsoft Azure that allows me to do amazing work remotely and deliver my classes via Teams or even using Webex like this week… That is the bad part of this week, I really don’t like webex (yes I have used lower case…). That interface seems from the 90”…. Let’s get back to the topic here.

This past week I had the amazing opportunity to speak to 3 different countries each one in a different continent:

  • Nigeria, Africa
  • Germany, Europe
  • Bangladesh, Asia

Remote allows us to do this kind of deliveries and impact people lives. I couldn’t have done something like this with in-person events, just too expensive to travel to all this places and more 1 week of work that I could do. This is why I started this article writing that this pandemic has been teaching us some important lessons. We can do more than what we were doing in the past. I also love the feedback that I’m getting from attendees saying that these events are super inclusive because you just need an Internet connection and you get access to the content. Like always I loved to interact with different persons from different cultures. It’s always amazing to understand how the world works across the globe! #WeCanDoMore

Here is some links and information about the sessions I delivered.

Learn Azure By Moonlight at Microsoft Teams – https://rdre.me/AzureMoonlightSeries

Nigeria – May 3, 2020 – 6:30 PM (GMT +1)
Session 1: Azure Web Apps

Azure Cologne Meetup at Virtual – https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cologne-Meetup/events/269934650/

Virtual – May 7, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM GMT+2
Session : Top 10 features of Azure Web Apps!

Bangladesh IT Community at Virtual – https://www.facebook.com/604241342952709/videos/926751294437116/
Virtual – May 8, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+2
Discussion about – Global Software Engineering Jobs after COVID-19 and Microsoft Azure.

Happy to speak more to other countries that want an awesome session about Azure! If you run a usergroup/community and your audience wants to know more about Azure, just ping me and I’m happy to accommodate you in my busy schedule.

You can keep up with all my speaking engagements at https://www.tiagocosta.com/speaking/

May Madness for online conferences – An opportunity to do better?

Tiago Costa / / Events, Speaking

Corona virus outbreak has changed the conference space forever. Some amazing conferences have been canceled, postpone, or converted into online only. This last model – online – it’s not by far my favorite. I love to interact with the attendees and other speakers at the conference I speak. Nevertheless, this new format has given me the opportunity to increase the number of conferences and usergroups I’m speaking. Along the years I have been getting way more invitations to speak than I can accommodate in my schedule. Or is because I need to be in another continent the next day or just because I want to be at home with the family that day, etc… Now I just need to login into Teams, Skype, or whatever tool the organizers are using and deliver from my home office.

In the next few days, I will deliver 2 sessions in user groups without leaving my office. One for Nigeria and another to a Germany user group based in Cologne! You can get all the information here:

Learn Azure By Moonlight at Online
Nigeria – May 3, 2020 – 6:30 PM (GMT +1)
Session 1: Azure Web Apps
Link: https://rdre.me/AzureMoonlightSeries

Azure Cologne Meetup at Online
Cologne, Germany – May 7, 2020 – 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM GMT+2
Session: Top 10 features of Azure Web Apps!
Link: https://www.meetup.com/Azure-Cologne-Meetup/events/269934650/

But the May madness is not just about these small gatherings, also 3 big names in the Cloud industry are organizing massive online conferences. Microsoft, GitHub and Docker will deliver a total of 5 free days full of content and mostly delivered by their Product Groups and close customers. This is an amazing opportunity for you to take. Specialy if it’s hard for you to attend this events in-person. Just the other day I was chatting online with, let’s call him Mr. T for privacy reasons. Usually Mr. T can’t go to this kind of events due to his medical condition. COVID-19 is forcing these events to be converted to virtual and allowing Mr. T and others like him having access to this kind of content. I just wanted to leave this here has a taught that maybe we can do better when in-person events are back. We need to be inclusive and allow then to have access, they already struggle with their condition; others are just because they simply can’t afford traveling and attending. Knowledge should not have a price tag. #WeCanDoBetter

I just leave here the list with all the information of the 3 big conferences.

GitHub Satellite – May 6 – 9:00 AM (GMT-7)


GitHub Satellite is a free virtual event featuring developers working together on the world’s software, announcements from the GitHub team, and inspiring performances by artists who code. The event is free and there are some payed workshops that cost only 50 USD and 100% of your purchase goes to organizations leading COVID-19 response efforts. You get to donate some money and learn. Sounds like an awesome plan!

You can watch last year keynote here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGC2rwOiaWc

More information / registration: https://githubsatellite.com/

Microsoft Build – May 18-19 – 09:00 AM (GMT-7)

Build is the major developer conference from Microsoft. The conference moto is “For developers by developers”. Based on previous years you should expect a lot of awesome content from the Product Groups and a lot of focus on Azure and Microsoft 365. This year Build moved to a virtual format and it’s totally FREE! You just need to register. As developers come together to help the world solve new challenges—sharing knowledge and staying connected is more important than ever. Join the Build community to learn, connect, and code—to expand your skillset today, and innovate for tomorrow.

More information / registration: https://mybuild.microsoft.com/

You can also check the some sessions from Build 2019 for free at: https://insider.windows.com/en-us/articles/microsoft-build-2019-sessions/

DockerCon Live 2020 – May 28 – 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (GMT-7)


DockerCom is going online via theCUBE! It’s a 1-day conference that’s free and completely online. You’ll hear from speakers in live interviews with theCUBE, hang out with Docker experts in the live hallway track, and watch recorded sessions while chatting live with the speakers. If you want to know more about running applications in Containers, this is a must to attend conference.

More information / registration: https://docker.events.cube365.net/docker/dockercon

So, there you go, some of the major names in the Cloud industry will provide amazing content for free and without you leave your home you can expand your knowledge. What are you waiting for, register today, stay safe and Learn!

Speaking at Global Azure 2020

Tiago Costa / / Azure, Speaking

Global Azure Lisbon – 25th April

The Global Azure 2020 – https://globalazure.net/ – was initially scheduled to be an in-person event across several cities in the world. Due to the limitation imposed by COVID-19, organizers had 2 options:

  1. Cancel the event
  2. Move to virtual.

I’m one of the organizers of the Lisbon event and the decision was to move to virtual, it never crossed my mind not having the event in Lisbon. Lisbon has been a proud member city since the first Global Azure event (remember it was called Global Windows Azure Global Bootcamp – GWAB).

You can find the Lisbon Virtual Global Azure at https://www.globalazure.pt. We already have more than 350 persons signup! It’s the best number EVER! We can still accommodate more people so, if don’t have a ticket, stop reading this post and get your FREE ticket right now!

I’m also a speaker on the event so if you want to learn all about how to build applications to respond to request and demand at a global scale, how can you lose this session??? My session will be delivered in English so that I can accommodate all my audience. Join me for a full 1 hour of fun session and demos, lots and lots of demos!!!

Global Azure Virtual 2020 UK & Ireland

Has some of you know I have my fair of traveling to the UK and Ireland. So it made all sense to also speak there and I’m very proud to got the possibility to do so. You can watch my session on the first day of the event – 23 April. Go to https://azureglobalbootcamp2020.azurewebsites.net/ and signup for the event! It will be awesome too!!!

Azure Tip: Add an SSL/TLS certificate to you Azure Web App for FREE!!!

Tiago Costa / / Azure

The Let’s Encrypt initiative is the market reference when we talk about free SSL certificates. It is a great initiative, but today, I want to talk about something super easy to implement under Azure Web Apps.

In Azure Web Apps, we now have the option to add a free, yes, you read it, FREE!!! SSL/TLS certificate. With this feature, you can create a certificate that can be used for SSL Binding for the selected sub-domain. App Service Managed Certificates are free of cost and fully managed by App Service to maintain the safety and security of your site at the highest level. This feature comes with some limitations:

  • No support for wildcard certificates
  • No support for naked domains
  • Cannot be exported
  • Does not support DNS A-records

If you have a workload that needs one of those features, currently, you cannot use this feature. You can Import App Service Certificates or even import your SSL/TLS certificate.

How to create the free certificate?

1. Navigate to the overview blade of your Web App and select the TLS/SSL settings option.

2. In the TLS/SSL settings blade, select the Private Key Certificates (.pfx) option.

3. In the TLS/SSL settings blade, select the + Create App Service Managed Certification option.

4. In the Create App Service Managed Certificates blade, in step 1, select the non-naked domain you want to create the SSL/TLS certificate and then press the Create button.

There you go, you just created a certificate for free for your Web App custom domain. All this for free with a super easy setup. If you like these Azure tips, leave your comments or questions in the comment box!

Productivity Hack: Kill back-to-back meetings

Tiago Costa / / Random words

We are living a … let’s be positive and called it “special” time! Corona virus outbreak is among us, and everyone that can, is working from home. You still need to interact with your team, customers and partners, so all conference calls services are seeing an exponential growth. Microsoft Teams saw a huge growth last week when not only a lot of customers started to work from home, but also schools started to teach virtually. You can check this article that states that Microsoft Teams surged to 44 million users (https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-teams-surges-44-million-daily-users-amid-coronavirus-outbreak), so that you can understand the huge growth. In November of 2019, Microsoft reported 20 million daily users!

I don’t want to write a huge article explaining how back-to-back meetings are a productivity killer. There are other authors that can explain this way better than me. Some meetings can overrun and if you have another meeting schedule without breaks… well… you get it! It’s important to allow for some break between meetings. What about if we could do this in an automatic way? If you’re using Microsoft Outlook, YES YOU CAN!!!

I bring you an amazing feature that we can use to allow some break between back-to-back meetings.

  1. Open your Microsoft Outlook desktop app.
  2. Under File, select Options.
  3. Select the Calendar tab and then check the End appointments and meetings early checkbox.

With this option you will create a shorter meeting allowing some break between meetings for your colleagues, partners and customers.

Hope you liked this option!