About Me

Hi, my name’s Aaron Powell and I’m a Cloud Developer Advocate (CDA) at Microsoft. Prior to that I worked at Readify in a number of different roles. My area of specialty is front-end web development, focusing on architecture around SPA and other UI-heavy web applications. My background is ASP.NET as a server technology but I’ve expanded into Node.js, a bit of Go, but ultimately trying to be a polyglot.

I’m also a passionate Open Source developer, with one of my main pet projects being Chauffeur an automation tool for the Umbraco CMS.

I do quite a bit of community work and public speaking, you’ll often find me at user groups in Sydney such as ALT.NET Sydney, presenting at conferences or organising the DDD Sydney conference.

Since 2011 I’ve been awarded a Microsoft MVP (Front-end Web Development) award for my contributions to the web development community.

Employment History

January 2019 - Present - Microsoft

January 2019 - Present

Regional Cloud Developer Advocate (CDA)

I work with developer communities to grow, achieve more and be more awesome.

September 2010 - December 2018 - Readify

September 2017 - December 2018

Technical Pre-sales Consultant

Expanding on the work on Technical Pre-Sales I was undertaking as a Principal Consultant I moved into a dedicated Technical Pre-Sales role. The primary focus of this role is:

  • Working with the sales team to qualify opportunities
  • Improving the technical skills of the sales team
  • Develop tools and practices to effectively respond to proposals
  • Create material that can be used by the sales team that speaks to the services Readify can deliver

August 2016 - August 2017

Principal Consultant

This was the end goal of a 6 year journey I’d taken within Readify, that I blogged about. As a Principal Consultant I:

  • Worked on Pre-Sales activities such as tender responses and lead qualification
  • Consulted to a multinational FinTech company with producing a front-end web architecture based on React
  • Consulted to a multinational services company to provide enterprise architecture services, process guidance and delivery capacity on a a React web portal and a React Native iOS/Android application
  • People management involving career mentoring, conflict management and general coaching
  • Working with the heads of the organisation on the strategic direction of Readify
  • Collaborating with the other Readify Principal Consultants

September 2010 - August 2016

Over my first 5 years at Readify I worked my way from the role of Senior Developer to Lead Consultant. During this time I worked across a variety of industries from banking to mining and many technologies. Some highlights are:

  • Working on a new web portal for one of the big 4 banks in Australia, using a combination of ASP.NET MVC and a custom JavaScript UI framework
  • Team lead for a web reporting platform for IoT devices in the mining industry, using a combination of ASP.NET WebAPI2, React, MongoDB and Azure PaaS
  • Leading a number of CMS builds using Umbraco across government, health care and entertainment

August 2009 - August 2010 - The FARM Digital

Senior Developer

I joined The FARM Digital to focus on delivering Umbraco-centric websites which aligned with the open source work I was doing at the time. I worked closely with the technical director who was also a contributor to Umbraco (and then joined them as a full time employee, eventually CTO) on how we optimised our repeatability of delivery (CI/CD, modularisation of the solutions, standard components, etc.).

August 2005 - August 2009 - WDG/Next Digital

Junior Developer/Senior Developer/Senior Architect

I joined WDG (later renamed Next Digital) as a Junior Developer out of university. Over my 4 years I worked across a number of CMS-centric projects, moving up to Senior Developer and eventually Senior Architect working on a custom CRM for a Victorian government department.

Open Source Work

I published my first Open Source project, Umbraco Interaction Layer, in 2008, which provided a LINQ interface to Umbraco. Through this I was invited to join the Umbraco CMS Open Source project where I developed a more fully-featured LINQ provider for Umbraco as well as being invited to their annual conference in 2009, CodeGarden, in Copenhagen.

Since then I’ve published a lot of my code to GitHub. Some of my highlight projects are:

  • Chauffeur
    • This is a tool to automate Umbraco deployments in a CI/CD process
    • It works in a similar vain to SQL migration tools by tracking steps that have previously been run and avoiding re-running them
    • It also provides a REPL style interface to interacting/inspecting Umbraco instances
  • LINQ in JavaScript
    • An implementation of LINQ using JavaScript generators to delay execution of collection queries
  • db.js
    • A wrapper around IndexedDB to introduce a Promise interface to IndexedDB
    • A fluent query API for IndexedDB databases
  • PSNVM
    • A Node.js version manager written in PowerShell

Public Speaking

I’ve spoke at a number of conferences across Australia, New Zealand, Europe and America. Some of my speaking highlights include:

I also speak quite frequently at User Groups in Sydney, some of which are available online.

DDD Sydney

Since 2016 I’ve been one of the lead organisers of the DDD Sydney conference, undertaking tasks such as:

  • Setting up a not for profit business entity (SydDev Inc) to own the event risk
  • Managing the website
  • Organising a venue
  • Speaker organisation
  • Volunteer organisation
  • On the day MC

Pluralsight

I’ve been a Pluralsight Author since 2012 with a variety of courses across a number of different technologies and platforms, from JavaScript to Umbraco.