Hi, my name’s Aaron Powell and I’m in DevRel at Microsoft/GitHub, based in Sydney, Australia. I’ve been at Microsoft since 2019, working with developer communities around AI tooling, .NET, and the web.
These days my work sits firmly at the intersection of AI and developer productivity. I spend most of my time advocating for, and contributing to, projects that help developers get the most out of AI-assisted development.
What I’m Working On Now
Awesome Copilot
A community-curated list of GitHub Copilot extensions, instructions, prompts, and resources. What started as a small experiment has grown to over 20k GitHub stars and 500+ resources — it’s pretty much my full-time focus right now, managing the OSS project and collaborating with product teams to make it even better.
Aspire Community Toolkit
A community-driven collection of integrations and components for .NET Aspire. I’m one of the maintainers and it’s been incredible to watch it grow to nearly 40 integrations, with some of that work finding its way into Aspire itself.
Speaking
I’ve spoken at conferences across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America. Some recent highlights:
- DDD Melbourne 2025 Locknote — “Coding like it’s 2005”: celebrating 20 years of software evolution and making the case for embracing AI tools the same way we embraced every other tool before them
- Microsoft Build 2025 — lightning talk, two full .NET + AI workshops, and time at the experts area
- AI Tour Sydney — presenting GitHub Copilot + Visual Studio to a few hundred developers in a 7,000-seat arena (sharing a stage with Elton John, technically 🎤)
You can find talks and recordings on my YouTube channel. For a full speaking history see my detailed background page.
Open Source
Beyond Awesome Copilot and the Aspire Community Toolkit, I’ve been publishing open source since 2008. I have a longer history of projects on my background page and on GitHub.
Contact Me
I’m happy to hear from people about public speaking (including abstract reviews), career advice, content peer-review, or collaboration. Reach me via: