A real-world demo and a playground for Azure Static Web Apps service.
This workshop has been presented at TestJS Summit 2021, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.
A real-world demo and a playground for Azure Static Web Apps service.
This workshop has been presented at TestJS Summit 2021, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.
Vanya Lebedev is an engineering manager for the Dynamics 365 supply chain manager team at Microsoft Ireland. He has been with Microsoft for over 12 years, previously working as a software engineer before transitioning to a managerial role.
Vanya Lebedev finds Microsoft special due to its global impact and the opportunity to work on products that are essential for many organizations around the world. The company's vision, culture, and the challenges in engineering keep him motivated and engaged.
Vanya's team is working on integrating multiple applications into a seamless suite for better user experience, ensuring the scalability and performance of these applications to meet the demands of global enterprise companies.
Microsoft promotes a culture where employees are encouraged to be curious, take risks, and learn from mistakes. The environment supports a growth mindset, customer obsession, and embraces diversity, which drives innovation and efficiency in their engineering organization.
The yearly hackathon at Microsoft allows engineers to work intensively on projects in a creative and supportive environment, helping to foster innovation and teamwork. This event is a platform for employees to develop new ideas and solutions over three days, significantly contributing to the company's dynamic engineering culture.
Vanya's team focuses on Dynamics 365 applications related to supply chain management, including sales, procurement, manufacturing, cost accounting, and more, specifically targeting intelligent order management, field service, and supply chain planning capabilities.
I'm an engineering manager at Microsoft Ireland, and I'll be sharing my personal view and experience on engineering at Microsoft. Microsoft has a long history of building products adopted worldwide. We work on products that make a difference for thousands of organizations and people. Our culture encourages curiosity, learning, and taking risks. We prioritize understanding our customers' needs and embrace diversity and inclusion. We believe everyone should be a leader and contribute to our culture and product development. Our yearly hackathon events promote a growth mindset.
Hello, everybody. Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Vanya Lebedev and I'm an engineering manager with the Dynamics 365 supply chain manager team at Microsoft Ireland. I have been working at Microsoft for over 12 years, first as a software engineer, and then as a manager, and I'm super thrilled about the opportunity to join the TESTJS summit today and to talk about engineering at Microsoft. So I will be sharing my personal view, perspective and experience on the topic.
I will dive into why I find Microsoft special and what kept me going for this 12 years. I will talk about the engineering challenges that my team is currently solving and about the engineering opportunities in the team. So I hope you will find it interesting. So, let's get started.
Everyone knows Microsoft. We have a long history of building products that got adopted all around the world. And this is probably the main reason why I joined the company back in 2009. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn what it's like to work in one of the most famous companies in the world. So I joined and never regretted. The engineering challenges for sure have been exciting so far and I've been having a really great time in the process of solving them.
One of the best things for me personally is that I've been working on products that are truly needed that make a difference for thousands of organizations around the world and for hundreds of thousands of people in these organizations. Our CEO, Satchin Adella, has expressed this ambition in the mission statement that you see on the screen right now. We want to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. This statement excites me personally very much, specifically because of the ambition, because of the scope of this vision. Think about it. It's every person on the planet. This is the scope of the reach that we are trying to achieve. This is a truly global endeavor.
And you know what? Having a great goal is great, but another thing that really, really inspires me, really gets me going is that not only do we have a vision of where we are going, but we also have a clear understanding of how we will be getting there. One smart man said that culture is strategy for breakfast. And it's very true. I think that it is the people around me and the culture that we all share that is and will be the cornerstone of Microsoft's success.
Everyone in the company, everyone around me is encouraged to always be curious, eager to learn, to take risks. And another thing that's really great is that everyone is also encouraged to not be afraid of making mistakes along the way. Because if you don't make mistakes, if you don't take risks, we will not make a difference. However, if we do make the mistakes, we will learn, we will get better and we will create a revolutionary software. So this is the culture. These are the messages that are really resonating with me.
And as part of this growth mindset, we are also trying to get obsessed with the customers, to get out of our way of understanding what their real needs are. We will not assume that we have learned everything. We know everything, but we will keep learning and learning and learning about them. Ultimately, creating better products and making a difference. Same goes for diversity and inclusion. We are a team which is so global, you cannot imagine. People from around the world with all different backgrounds, genders, etc. are very welcome on the team, and everyone brings a unique perspective.
There were so many examples in my career where their opinions and ideas helped us to produce better software and products, and ultimately succeed. This is something that I think is very unique and very inspiring about my work. This is why I keep going. Another thing that really stands out to me about about work at Microsoft is that the culture like this, the culture that I was just describing, does not come up on its own, does not emerge on its own. It requires a strong vision and strong leadership and collective effort and to accelerate our culture we have introduced this vision of what are the great leaders in the organization and we believe that everyone, every engineer, every person in the org should be a leader, otherwise we will not be able to progress as fast as we want to, we will not be able to shape our culture, we will not be able to build the products that we need, and it's really great when people start adopting this mindset, this is something that really helps us to get things done, people do not sit in the corner and complain, everyone takes their fate in their hands and makes a difference, makes a change, this really helps driving great, healthy, efficient engineering organisation, so this is something I really like.
It was a lot of words, but what about some concrete examples, I think one great example of how Microsoft is promoting this growth mindset are the yearly hackathon events. For three days, everyone in the org, every engineer in the org just goes in a completely dark mode with pizzas and everything to hack their ideas and produce code applications, improvements that they have been thinking about for a long time. Let's have a quick look at the recording of what can be achieved. Yep.
Hackathons have been an amazing experience for me, generating great ideas and fostering a strong team dynamic. Our team focuses on supply chain management applications for enterprises, covering various areas such as sales, procurement, manufacturing, and more. Building such a large-scale product requires a team of thousands of engineers. We face challenges in performance, scalability, integration, and user experience. Fortunately, we leverage the Microsoft Cloud and cutting-edge technology like Power Apps and microservice architecture to overcome these challenges.
So this is what can be achieved with hackathons. I personally have been participating for the last five years. Every time, it was an amazing experience, and we always came up with great ideas and had an amazing time doing this. Again, it was a lot of words and a lot of cultural things, but we are all engineers here.
You're probably curious, okay, what are the engineering challenges. What is your team doing? So our team is bringing supply chain management applications to enterprises. We are focusing on the business applications side of things, and this is a small slide, which shows what kind of areas we are covering. So our applications cover sales, procurement, manufacturing, cost accounting, supply and demand planning, warehousing, transportation, finance, tax. You can see on the slide, just reading the titles of the applications that comprise the suite of our products is immense. And if you think about the size of the product, it's tens of thousands of types of persistent entities. It's hundreds of thousands of classes, millions of automated tests.
The team that is needed to build software like this is a few thousand people, a few thousand engineers. Naturally, my team is responsible for a smaller piece of this application. Primarily, we are focusing on intelligent order management, on field service and on supply chain planning capabilities. But the engineering challenges are many. So we are targeting upper-mid-size to global enterprise companies. And with a company size like this, performance and scalability requirements are insanely hard to meet. Another interesting challenge is how do we integrate so many applications into a suite that would have a seamless look and feel and would be integrated seamlessly to give the users an easy and efficient experience. And, of course, the user experience itself. So how do we make this application as delightful as possible? So, luckily, we are tapping into the power of the Microsoft Cloud to build this suite of applications, and we are using the latest and the greatest technology to achieve this. Power Apps is the platform that sets up the framework for our development. We are also embracing the microservice architecture as a means of scaling out independently, releasing independently, making sure that our...
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