This post was originally published here
July the holiday month, or at least that’s when the summer holiday season starts in the Netherlands. And this year I went for a holiday with the family to Portugal (Porto) and France (Montréal, Midi-Pyrénées).
Month July
For me this is a special month as the MVP renew cycle starts, which is now yearly. And I have always have been a July MVP, hence nothing really changed for me. Anyways, I got renewed, a great start of the month!
I shared the picture above on LinkedIn with the text: “Awarded for the eight time! Thanks Microsoft. Coolest Technology!!!”. And this posted got to my surprise more than 8000 views in a week. Awesome!
In the beginning of July I consolidated my talk at Integate2017 London into a blog post: Building sentiment analysis solution with Logic Apps. This years integrate was a success as many of you might have read in various blog post that recap the event. And there will be an US Integrate later this year in October, where I will be one of speakers too.
What else did I do this month. Well I worked together with Kent for one of his Middleware Friday shows: INTEGRATE 2017 Highlight Show. We recorded our interview session in Dublin. And I wrote a blog post about Azure Functions, go serverless!
Another thing I like to mention is that for a customer I worked hard with a team on a POC with CosmosDB, Graph model and Azure Search. And we have achieved some important milestones. Some of the learning I will share in upcoming months.
Holiday
As mentioned already it’s summer holiday season in the Netherlands and I went with my family to Porto in Portugal to visit Sandro and his family.
No suprises here, we went to have lunch, visit Porto and have an ice cream of course (Santini).
Books
Since I was on holiday I was able to read a few books. With a long road trip to Porto I saw a few movies related to AI, digitalization and IOT:
And what I found interesting about seeing this movies is how they relate to these books I read:
The world is changing around us with sensors, devices and huge amounts of data. Moreover, this makes us more aware of everything around is and smart, at least we get more insights.
Blockchain
During Integrate 2017, my buddy Kent talked a lot about Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. And I got intrigued, yet I did not fully understand both. Therefore, I bought and read these two books to get a better understanding:
Both are recently pusblished books, relevant and up to date.
Relaxing books
Besides some technical books I read two thrillers to relax and chill:
The first is defenitely an amazing well written thriller and if you like the movies Se7en than this is for you!
Music
My favorite albums that were released in July were:
- Decapitated – Anticult
- Prong – Zero Days
- Wintersun – The Forest Seasons
Hence, another month gone by. Next month I will continue to work on the POC and prepare for sessions in September and October.
Cheers,
Steef-Jan
