Jet.com at Microsoft //BUILD_
I recently had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle. It was an amazing week of inspiring talks and sessions for all things Microsoft.
As you may know, Jet.com is a huge Microsoft shop. We are hosted on Microsoft Azure, and many of our microservices are written in the F# programming language, which runs on Microsoft’s .NET framework. We use other Azure products as well, such as CosmosDB.
Right from the starting keynote (at 8:30am!), in a huge room that seated 4,000 people and was completely filled, I realized Microsoft really cares about its developer community.
Satya Nadella is no Steve Balmer, but he is very, very passionate about his own vision, and being in a large room with 4,000 other developers hearing it was inspiring.
I also again realized that Microsoft does a ton of stuff. In their three-hour opening keynote, they discussed Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Office, databases, Azure, Tools, IoT, and more.
I attended a lot of smaller talks, too. Some were highly technical (Technical overview of Cosmos DB), others were more about culture (How Chevron is developing an agile dev culture as they migrate), and others more were trendy (An Introduction to Blockchain with Mark Russinovich). All of the speakers were well prepared, and the material was relevant and presented professionally.
Scott Havens, Director of Engineering at Jet.com &Walmart Labs, presented a great talk on the Jet technology stack: From startups to big-business: Using functional programming techniques to transform line of business applications. He spoke about how we use Event Sourcing and how it relates to our functional programming model. It’s well worth watching.
Our Jet.com/Walmart Labs booth on the expo floor had lots of visitors as well. We gave away water bottles and umbrellas, which came in handy during late spring rainstorm on the third day. We had lots of conversations about our technology stack with conference attendees.
In summary, BUILD was a great opportunity to learn more about current offerings from Microsoft and a great opportunity to talk 1:1 with folks who are building the tools and systems that we use to run our business.
