Reconnect Series: Jim Szubryt
Published Dec 04 2019 08:14 AM 2,426 Views
Steel Contributor

Jim Szubryt is a Reconnect Member from Chicago, Illinois. He received MVP Awards in ALM/VSDT from 2013 to 2018. 

 

Jim currently leads the container platform program for Windows containers and container security for Accenture’s internal IT. “Developing the end-to-end containers platform has been a two-year journey for the team I lead,” said Jim. “Moving legacy .NET apps from IaaS to Windows was challenging. We chose Azure Service Fabric as it was the most mature option for hosting Windows containers.”

 

Jim explained how his team took the approach of managing it as a centralized offering for a number of reasons: “Rather than each team standing up their own cluster, we went with the centralized approach in order to reduce overall infrastructure costs have a consistent CI/CD approach with Azure DevOps, build security in from the start and provide logging/monitoring via Log Analytics with PowerBI.”

 

For Jim, being a Reconnect member allows him to provide other Reconnect MVPs with the wealth of knowledge that he’s accumulated with Azure DevOps, Service Fabric and containers. “Admittedly, I’ve been consumed with the container project I’ve been working on, and have now reached a point where I can contribute a great deal of knowledge back to the community,” he said.

 

Jim has been keen to get involved with community events, having spoken at GOTO, Chicago Code Camp, and VSLive. “My underlying theme has been the ability to use Azure DevOps as the foundation of your work and progress. There is tremendous value you get out of the box with the product and I continuously want to help people realize that,” explained Jim.

 

“The Reconnect community has shown the passion its members have in their areas of expertise and their willingness to share this with others for their own development,” he added.

 

Other projects that Jim is involved with include the ALM Rangers, a group of people that share their real-world experiences with the community. “There is a great value to the community to know best practices and approaches that people in the Ranger program have done, and how others can do it as well,” Jim said.

 

When he was an MVP, Jim enjoyed the MVP summits as they provided an opportunity for the Azure DevOps product team to share with MVPs where they were planning to go with the product. “They listened to us on what we saw as valuable or gaps in what they wanted to do,” he added.

 

“The Azure product team was very open and receptive to our opinions and it showed in how the product matured. The VSDT MVPs have a great relationship with the product team and I was glad to be a part of that.”

 

Jim’s advice to new MVPs is “be vocal and get out there. Give your opinion to Microsoft, share your knowledge with the community and continue to be passionate about learning more to improve yourself.”

 

In the future, Jim plans to talk more about the best practices people should have as second nature from the start, container usage and how Microsoft products and partners can enable this.


Check out Jim’s blog here and follow him on Twitter: @jszubryt.

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