About Me

Hi, my name’s Aaron Powell and I’m in DevRel at Microsoft/GitHub, based in Sydney, Australia. I’ve been at Microsoft since January 2019, and these days my focus is squarely on AI developer tooling — particularly GitHub Copilot and the ecosystem of extensions, instructions, and resources around it.

Prior to Microsoft I worked at Readify for over eight years, progressing from Senior Developer through to Principal Consultant and Technical Pre-Sales. My technical background spans ASP.NET, Node.js, React, and a little Go — I’ve always tried to be a polyglot.

I’m a long-time Open Source contributor with projects on GitHub dating back to 2008, and I’m an active public speaker at conferences across Australia, North America, and Europe.

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

DevRel at Microsoft/GitHub

I work with developer communities to help them get the most out of Microsoft’s developer tools and platforms. Today my primary focus is AI developer tooling — primarily GitHub Copilot. I’m the lead maintainer of Awesome Copilot, a community-curated list of Copilot extensions, instructions, prompts, and resources that has grown to over 20k GitHub stars and 500+ resources. I also co-maintain the Aspire Community Toolkit, a collection of community-built integrations for .NET Aspire.

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 current and highlight projects are:

  • Awesome Copilot
    • A community-curated list of GitHub Copilot extensions, instructions, prompts, and resources
    • Grown to 20k+ GitHub stars and 500+ resources since launching in 2025
    • I manage the OSS project and work with product teams to improve the ecosystem
  • Aspire Community Toolkit
    • Community-built integrations and components for .NET Aspire
    • Nearly 40 integrations, with some work graduating into Aspire itself
  • Chauffeur
    • A tool to automate Umbraco deployments in a CI/CD process
    • Works in a similar vein to SQL migration tools by tracking steps that have previously been run and avoiding re-running them
    • 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 spoken at conferences across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America. Some of my speaking highlights include:

  • DDD Melbourne 2025 Locknote — “Coding like it’s 2005”: a celebration of 20 years of software evolution and an argument for embracing AI tools the same way we’ve embraced every other tool
  • Microsoft Build 2025 — lightning talk, two full-day .NET + AI workshops, and time at the experts area meeting developers
  • AI Tour Sydney 2024 — presenting GitHub Copilot + Visual Studio to hundreds of developers in a 7,000-seat arena
  • Speaking at every DDD Melbourne except 2015 (due to the birth of my son) since it started in 2010
  • Speaking at 4 CodeGarden conferences
  • Speaking at NDC Sydney 2016 (Beyond console.log), NDC London 2017 (The beauty of stupid ideas and Redux, beyond React) and NDC Sydney 2017
  • Speaking at multiple TechEd’s across Australia and New Zealand

I also speak 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.