At the end of January I spoke at Microsoft Azure User Group Poland in Wrocław - 29 January, Azure Databricks and Unity Catalog from a DevOps perspective. English meetup, mostly platform and application engineers rather than data scientists.

I had joined a Databricks engagement from the Azure infrastructure side - Terraform, identity, pipelines - rather than from notebooks. The meetup was a compressed version of that delivery work. I am expanding the same material into a longer whitepaper with diagrams; this post is the short form from right after the talk.

On 16 December I gave a lecture at Serverless Wrocław called Azure OpenAI + ASP.NET - a story based on facts. Polish talk, company-branded slides so nothing to host here - this post is the English write-up of the same material, including what happened to our Azure OpenAI resource in the weeks after the meetup.

No sample repository to clone. The lecture walked through a real internal experiment: matching people to project requirements in a software house, using Azure OpenAI from an ASP.NET app, with Azure AI Search in the middle. At the end I also compared that path with Copilot Studio - mostly to show that Microsoft gives you more than one way to solve similar problems.

Tuesday, 5 November — the local 4Developers Wrocław 2024 autumn edition. Several parallel tracks (Application Architecture, Big Data & ML/AI, Cloud & DevOps, Security, and others), registration from 8:00, and the kind of hallway energy the main festival is known for — just closer to home.

My employer sponsored the Big Data & ML/AI track, but the ticket came through a different door: Akademickie Stowarzyszenie Informatyczne at Wrocław University of Technology, where I chaired the board years ago. ASI was a community partner and had passes for alumni. Old student-association contacts still open doors — I am not complaining.

CaseWeek at AGH finished a couple of weeks ago — during IAESTE CaseWeek 2023 in Kraków I ran a three-session workshop: Creating CI/CD Automation Using GitHub Actions — DevOps Deployments to Azure Cloud. English, about four and a half hours split across three afternoons, mostly second- and third-year students who had written code before but had not wired a deployment pipeline.

The GitHub repo is where I put the sample apps, reference workflows, and session notes while the material was still warm. Slide decks from the live event are not there — this post is the outline I wish I had written down before the first cohort showed up.

SoftServe’s RoadShow Poland tour passed through Rzeszów on 12 October and Kraków on 14 October. I had the same lecture slot at both campuses — Platform Landing Zone for Azure Cloud — and most people in the room had never registered an Azure tenant for a company before.

Instead of opening with enterprise vocabulary, I used a simple story: imagine you and a few colleagues just founded a student association, or a first small startup after graduation. You need a place to manage accounts, shared mail, maybe an app or two, and eventually something you deploy for users — but nobody has done “company cloud” before. Walking through that scenario made it easier to explain what a tenant is, why Entra groups exist, and why Microsoft separates a platform landing zone (shared identity and foundation) from an application landing zone (where your product actually runs). Register the association’s domain, add members, set who can do what, then think about subscriptions and resources — same building blocks, smaller scale than a bank, but the same ideas.

As my blog is mostly a static website running via Hugo, I always thought that bothering with setting some automated workflow to deploy it is a rather pointless task.

Step 1 - Prepare the server - how to login from agent

As I wanted to have an automated deployment via external Github agent, I had to provide it access to my server. For this purpose I created a separate account, which only has access to add/edit content within my nginx blog directory.