Meet the Speaker – Tristan Edwards

Our sponsers aren’t just anyone – they’re people who we enjoy wotking with and provide lots of value to our community. We asked Tristan from Grey Matter a few questions prior to his upcoming talk on modern app deployment techniques on Azure.

Name: Tristan Edwards
Job role: Group Head of Services , Grey Matter
Twitter: @tristankedwards

What’s your biggest passion?

My biggest passion and what motivates me are almost one and the same. I enjoy a challenge and get great satisfaction from solving technical problems.

How do you start your mornings?

Would it be cliché if I said drinking coffee?

What does a ‘typical’ work day look like?

Is there one? I don’t think there is a ‘typical’ day at work. No one day is the same. I can spend a whole day in meetings with different members of the team and customers, other days I’m attending and presenting at technical events, or implementing and deploying projects for businesses. I guess the one thing that they all have in common is that the end goal is helping customers adopt the cloud.

Who do you lunch with?

The rumour is true, I have lunch with my laptop

When are you most productive?

That’s a hard one. I guess I can answering it by saying the only time I’m not productive is in the evenings when I’m tired

What one thing do you try to do every day?

Try is the keyword here. I try to go to the gym every day. I’m not going to give you the success rate for that though – not having a ‘typical’ day at work can make routine difficult!

What is your talk about?

There is a common problem that I come across in my job all the time. Developers that have amazing applications that solve brilliant problems, but they’re spending a whole lot of time and effort getting their application out into the world, and it’s not necessary. Historically you’ll have gone through a long-winded process to deploy an application, but with tools like Visual Studio and cloud platforms, it’s so much easier for developers to get their applications to reach a greater audience – it can take just a few seconds. I’m going to give one example, with a demo, of how developers can employ modern app deployment methods to make their jobs easier.

What is the best resource for people who want to dive in deeper?

There are some great resources out there. For Microsoft tools specifically they’ve got a load of documents on how to do things here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/

I have recorded an Azure Deep Dive webinar: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/924093739099158284

Code Matters is a great technical blog covering development, AI, geospatial, data… https://codematters.online/

What is the biggest challenge in the [field/topic/industry] at the moment?

I think one of the biggest challenges is adopting change. There are some huge innovations out there in the technology space, businesses especially can see the advantages that adoption of new technologies have, but it’s creating that positive mindset for change and acting on it that is a challenge that we see time and again.  


Thanks Tristan for your answers! If you want to find out more, come along to our meetup:

Fab February Meetup

Wednesday, Feb 6, 2019, 7:00 PM

The Workshop @ The Phoenix
Gandy Street Exeter, GB

61 Members Went

** PLEASE NOTE – THIS IS A WEDNESDAY EVENING!! ** Our usual mix of top quailty Lightning Talks and Chit-Chat. We’re mixing up the format this time to allow for more networking time (which is something you lot have asked for!) * LIGHTNING TALK: Dr Jacqueline Christmas from Exeter University : Reading the Past: How Computer Science is enabling Archae…

Check out this Meetup →