Rory Preddy, Microsoft | Yalla DevOps 2022

This is texturung TV. Hey, we're back at yala devops. I think there's some great sessions going on this beautiful lunch being served and let me introduce you right here.

You know that commercial the most influential man in the world the most important man in the world. Influential person in cloud in the world that's voted by analytica analytica. We've got Rory pretty.

A pretty means from the village. He's not sure what village he's from but well actually he's from the Microsoft Village a small startup out of Seattle small side. You might have heard of them.

They got something with the cloud now too right where we saw that other people doing the clouds that we said this this is good stuff. Let me do me too. And then we did the gaming thing.

Also, this was good stuff and let's take the game. Oh, so actually I have a I have a lot of those games. Anyway all killing aside Rory pretty is with Microsoft.

He comes to us today. He's actually lives in South Africa, but he's here for y'allah devops in Tel Aviv very welcome. Thank you.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Yep.

So let's start off give people a little or kidding inside your background. You do work with Microsoft. I think.

Yes, so I am a 42 year old male. I have brown hair and I have a black top and I have a contra place here at dwarfism. Now what I just did is a voice.

Duration, because one of the things that I'm very passionate about that Microsoft is accessibility now tell you a bit of a secret. We actually are mandated everyone at Microsoft to spend 20% of our capacity on diversity and inclusion. So I take Mark twenty percent actually more than 20% and I become a advocate for Microsoft for accessibility and accessibility is the design of products and services so that everyone can use them.

It's not designing for just one disability and it's designing for everyone now what is disability? Now as part of my midlife classes, I'm 42. So I started losing weight and I was 65 kilos at the time at the start of it and I was four foot one now for you Americans at 120 centers.

I just screwed me all up. Okay, one of those beer mask scales and you can see where this is going. All right, and I put in my heart and my details there and I jumped on the scale and it said okay baby.

Oh man, I thought oh my gosh. Okay. This is not gonna end.

Well, I put in baby. The thing called me morbidly or Peace Love is you design the circus. It happens to the best of us.

Yeah, but then then I put in the bed the tall man that said, you know like morbidly anorexic. So I thought wait this is this is terrible because and no one understands my own condition and I felt disabled this so that's how you do it. So you you look at your design and products of services and you make sure that people don't feel disabled at the same time.

We use AI hosted on Azure to take advantage of some incredible Innovative services. We have something called immersive reader immersive readers. You can use the Azure cognitive service.

You can take a little button on any website and you pop it up there and it creates a I want to say the word Amazon Kindle but a Kindle like experience and you can make it the reading company very easily and because neurodiversity is also very dear to us to be able to help people with reading comprehension. You got a Microsoft Word you click on check accessibility. It will go in and it'll take analyze your picture and say this is the alternative text for it.

But it uses as your cognitive services in the background to go in there and scan that in for you and they don't add the alt text for you though. So even though I'm an accessibility advocate for for Microsoft. I'm also a cloud Advocate because they go hand in hand, whether these are great examples.

So first I got to tell you something that example of where you yourself felt to disabled you have to disability is to me fastening right because that really brings his home is look what you didn't fit into any of these preconceived boxes that we had. So and I never thought of it like that code towards the box, but it's a different powerful books. So we call it inclusive design.

It's a very old Paragon that goes all the way back to the 60s when Computing systems with the sounds of a Tree. So, for example, if you have an amputee in the amputee actually doesn't have use of their arm. They're in the same Spectrum as someone who may have fallen off their moped GoPed, you know, one of those scooters that they seem to be all over.

Yeah, like nearly a whopped me off the the planet a couple of times but during the same Spectrum also as a newborn a parent with the newborn because you cradling the newborn in your hand. If you go to your stakeholders and you say I want to code for the the person with the MPT they say, okay the US Center for statistics says there's only tweaking 26,000, but when you look at the the person who fell off the moped and the new parent, there's 22 million. So then it starts to make sense.

Then we look at weight everyone who has accessible requirements and there's a billion people out there. It's accessible requirements and their friends and family and those who are financially involved with them. It's three and a half billion.

It's the half the world and for example, the silver generation the over 70s. They had the most disposable income out of anyone though. So then you take that idea that you have to code and you extended over your product design and you use AI to caterpon reach people at the same time use devops to say where the second my system is not acting accessible and use the GitHub actions.

We haven't get up actions called accessibility insights. You can go download it completely free and then You can say there's a stop guy there. It's not really accessible and then rinse and repeat and use that agile process to go in and make sure that nothing gets through that quality gate.

com at a kind of a background here. But that really is you can pair the two you can pair AI accessibility and devops together to make sure that everyone in every organization is empowered to do more I love this. Here's my here's my issue.

If everyone could listen to what you just said internalize it and live it we'd have a much more accessible world. I think for many organizations who aren't as affluent or is community-minded. Let's say is Microsoft accessibility to them means complying like with 509 kind of nonsense.

Well, the EU parliamentary or the or the right the different variations around the world and it you know, and this is I come from security. This was a major problem with security compliance people started doing compliance for compliance sake not compliance for security sake when it was security compliance. It's the same thing with accessibility if we do accessibility to comply with the letter of Allure statute or a regulation, but not to truly understand as you said, it's not just the amputee who doesn't have you said this hand.

It's the mother carrying the newborn. It's the person who took a header off their scooter here in the streets in Tel Aviv that you got to understand you got to care about the people and understand it's more than just a regulation the regulations from most part or always least common denominator Lois bar. That's why you should hire people who have accessible needs because these three different types of people.

There's the people who need you to design your products. Your customers there's the people who design your products and then there's the allies right and you want the Allies the people who are and not necessary who have accessibility to requirements. But you want the people to work closely to those individuals who have accessible needs because I guarantee you if that I had at the opportunity to say go No, go because of my accessible needs it would be mean a lot to me as my last purpose to say no go and then you hire that.

We have an inclusive hiring process that you bring those and those allies and those Advocates inside your organization and they do more for your organization than anyone because I agree from the outside you've got stickle carrots and the carrot is really inclusive design more revenue and the stick is the compliance side, but the secret sauce is making your organization with inclusive hiring and and getting you to be the the actual your human capital, which is most important for any organization to be invested in. Process I love it. All right, let's come back to what else you said because I want to I want to kind of hammer this home with the audience the three elements here we have ai, Devops, what was the third that would be acceptability so Cloud but no.

No, but these all solar is these are three elements that help you make for successful accessibility. So they'll be cloud-based products and services. It would be one of the the things that we really really proud of is as your co-pilot that allow you to code in any language and anytime and explains your code and we have GitHub code spaces that did that talk in front of the mot the military of Defense organization one of our huge customers in Israel, and I showed them how I never left the browser to go all the way process for accessible there and I designed an application popped it on to a kubernetes cluster pushed it through there did code ql for CVS scanning and then rod and popped into a container app and made an accessible website through that never leaving the browser once and even deep liking my talk at container right there inside the code spaces.

Was it I love that you telling the truth. You're right. Yeah.

That's impressive. That's we developers really have always been an undemocratized bunch of mob a mob. Yes, and now that we slowly but surely democratizing things that that they didn't have access to an IDE code scanning and a an AI assistant accessibility.

We are now the cool kids not only the cool kids but we are the decision makers. Yes, if you go to anyone, can you say how important is the developer to the decision-making of your company? They'll say critical to this.

So it's the same with accessibility in cloud and Microsoft understands that that's why I'm a developer Advocate because I go to where the developers are and I use a Mech I use Chrome and I'm a Java developer because at the end of the day not everyone wears the same hat and others like myself prefer Chrome Mac and and Java and you need to meet the way that developers are where they are though, because it's like the mother tongue. You can't expect someone to speak at different language. When they're fluent in their happy where they are.

Absolutely Rory this is delightful for our audience. Maybe this is their first impression of you. How could they follow you?

How could they hear more? Okay, so I'm on the tweeters on at Rory pretty so Ro Ry PR e w d y. I'm also on the linkedin's the little company.

We also also Microsoft. Yeah people they got their hands and a lot of Pies there on linkedin's a fabulous because LinkedIn is a great place because it actually gives you the ability to make meaningful connections, but also you can actually do introductions to other people and which I love about that show you something interesting about LinkedIn. It's my own personal experience.

I thought everybody in the world goes to LinkedIn everybody 800 million people. But I read a thing that it's primarily aimed at those in the technology world. That when you go outside of the Techna and it's me living in my own bubble that when you go outside the technology world, not everyone is on LinkedIn.

So I would say technology is also including infantic Insurance mining. So anywhere that they need to really be connected on a non-organic measure though. So none organic means that I need a former connection to you digitally and and definitely in fintech definitely insurance.

It's it's an incredible thing because fintech pivots on technology and Tech in the fit, but I I agree with you. But anyway, I I disrupted the train so training LinkedIn where else At second of all, we have a website you can go and search for developer Advocates. I work with the team of 90 other individuals.

Yeah, and they pivot on these Technologies, you're talking students. We're talking power bi Microsoft graph dotnet infrastructure some of the names that you've already aware of their John pepper and well, it was a Donovan Brown before he he left over well before he left, you know, that's there, you know, and and we really we helped the product teams. So I'm gonna go feed back to the product teams and visual studio code on Microsoft Azure for all of the discussions here and I said, they liked us they don't like that change that and we're the the kind of blue that the product teams.

They don't they can't really scale up to the field and we engage with the developers that we do podcasts and blogs and a lot of material you can go until we're YouTube site. We have a website called. Sorry a YouTube side called job at Microsoft and we Are published Java basic language training there?

net. We also have a pattern series though. So nearly any platform you can think of we are looking at the tiki talks and the YouTubes YouTube shorts and making it a little bit short, but it's hard to take a a company with 250,000 people and slow them down to six or eight seconds to do that.

I would try to make our company slow down. Anyway here Rory looks like they're serving lunch. So that's gonna get loud here really quickly, man.

You are you are truly a treasure. Thank you for coming on and appreciate it. Alrighty.

Hey, we are it y'allah devops. We're gonna take a break. It's lunch time.

We'll be back with a Full Slate this afternoon of some great conversations until then. Take care.