43. Serverless, Ably & Pixel Art

43. Serverless and Azure Functions, SaaS product Ably & creating Pixel art and retro games - with Marc Duiker

In this episode, we talk to Marc Duiker, he is a senior developer advocate at Ably and has a strong focus on event-driven architectures in the Azure cloud and serverless technologies. He started Azure Functions University on GitHub, a free and open-source learning curriculum. He likes to create pixel art, code visuals & music, and design retro games. We talk about his job at Ably, everything you need to know about Ably and their SaaS product; real-time communication, native WebSockets, its security, and how it compares to Azure Web PubSub are discussed. And he shares what it's like to move from a consulting role in a services company to a technology company making a technical product. We dive into his hobbies of creating pixel artwork and small retro games, for example, his Azure Function logo game. How his pixel art avatars went, sort of, viral. How he even added pixel art animals to the VS Code Pets extension. And learning new techniques or languages in the process, such as TypeScript. Furthermore, Marc is probably one of the biggest advocates of Serverless and Azure Functions in the Netherlands. So, we touch upon why he thinks Serverless is so powerful, his Azure Functions University on GitHub, and creating custom bindings.

About this episode, and Marc Duiker in particular: you can find @marcduiker on X, GitHub and his Azure Functions University GitHub. And don't forget to read his blog on Cloud PubSub services compared: Azure Web PubSub vs Ably. You can also find all of his links and his retro games via his Linktree.

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