Episode 66 – Damian Brady on the Rise to Cloud Developer Advocacy

Damian’s Bio:
Damian is a Cloud Developer Advocate specializing in DevOps. After spending a year in Toronto, Canada, he returned to Australia – the land of the dangerous creatures and beautiful beaches – in 2018.
Formerly a dev at Octopus Deploy and a Microsoft MVP, he has a background in software development and consulting in a broad range of industries. In Australia, he co-organized the Brisbane .Net User Group and launched the now annual DDD Brisbane conference. He regularly speaks at conferences, User Groups, and other events around the world, and is an occasional guest on various podcasts like .NET Rocks and Hanselminutes.
Damian has his own Channel 9 show – The DevOps Lab. Check it out for real-world guidance on implementing DevOps in your organization!
Most of the time you’ll find him talking to developers and IT Pros to help them get the most out of their DevOps strategies.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Hi, Everyone. Today, my guest is Damian Brady. Damian, how are you?
Damian: I’m good, thank you. How are you?
Arsalan: Doing fantastic. And, you are not in the US. You are actually somewhere else. Where are you right now?
Damian: I’m in Australia at the moment, on the East coast in a place called New Castle, which is about two hours North of Sydney.
Arsalan: Right. Is it true that it’s summertime over there? It’s hot and sunny where you live?
Damian: Yeah, it’s very much summer time. It’s been 30-something degrees every day, which is Celsius. I can’t do the conversion. We’re talking 90’s [in Fahrenheit], I think.
Arsalan: Wow. I live in Ohio and we’ve had lots of snowstorms this time of the year. We are not very far from Canada, where you lived for a while. What were you doing there?
Damian: I was living in Toronto for 12 months, basically for my wife’s work. I went over there with her. I’m lucky enough to be able to work pretty much from anywhere in the world. So, I went over there for a year and we just got back to Australia maybe two weeks ago. It was a bit of a change. It was -28 Celsius, which is probably pretty close to that in Fahrenheit when we left Toronto. It was plus 30, in the 90’s I think, when we got to Brisbane, where I used to live in Australia and then we came down to New Castle, which is where I’m living now.
Arsalan: Yeah, the world is a large place and the climates are so different. It’s just amazing to meet people from different parts of the world and it’s really good to have someone from Australia on our podcast. We haven’t had that before.
Arsalan: You currently work for Microsoft. What’s your title again?
Damian: I’m a cloud developer advocate for Microsoft.
Arsalan: We’re going to unpack that in a little bit, but first, I want to hear from you about something interesting that happened to you in your career as you were starting out when you were a student. You were in college and you were working on a voting system for the Australian elections. What happened there?
Damian: Yeah, it was interesting. I was in the third year of my IT degree. We had a group project, which involved a few people. We set up our tasks. The project was to write an electronic voting system. So, everyone would submit their votes and it would follow the Australian Federal Voting System, which has preference allocations and all sorts of fancy stuff that happens with Australian elections.

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