How do you get into cloud computing and into Azure?
Where do you even start and what if you do front-end code creating amazing
websites and worrying about the user interface. Hmm.
I talked to Amy Kapernick about her journey into Azure land and how she has
found it. It may include Quokkas.
[inaudible]
So where do you start?
Like how do you actually get into using Azure when you have a,
say a project like you had an idea, um, how do you know where to go?
Well, I didn't really know where to start,
so I spoke to people who knew a lot more about Azure than I did, which,
which is basically anybody who's used Azure. Uh,
and I explained what I was wanting to do and so we tried it out.
So I first started using an app service cause I was running a front end and uh,
express API backend on the,
in the same system.
So it was using an app service so I could have that together.
But I was having issues with it, kept going to sleep.
And so if I hadn't used it for a while, the first post request would fail.
One I'd have to try again.
So then talking to someone about it,
he explained about as Azure functions a bit and recommended that I split the
front end and the back end out.
So I've got just static site for the front end and I'm using Azure functions for
the backend, for the API. So I can send post requests to that,
which I've had less issues of it timing and going to sleep.
So you had one solution that was kind of working and then you just reiterated on
it and you've made it better essentially. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
Which is what we do in software. Right. So, um, tell me about your talk today.
Cause I know there's a really cool example and,
and tell me how that all works and what it does.
So today I am talking about how I built my Quokka bot.
And so for anybody who doesn't know, Quokka is an Australian marsupial
native to Western Australia.
And it's pretty much only found on an Island off the coast of Perth called
Rottnest Island. [inaudible]. They're very cute.
Little animals have no natural predators, aren't afraid of humans,
and they often look like they're smiling and they're really great at posing for
selfies. So when I started building this,
I wanted to showcase a little bit of Western Australia and so I originally built
a bot that allowed you to send in a message via WhatsApp,
ask for a picture of a Quokka and it would send you one.
This has now been iterated on and so now you are able to send in an image as
your function sends that through to cognitive services,
which I have a trained image classification models,
which will detect whether or not there is a Quokka in the image and send the
response back to you. You can, however,
still just request a picture of a Quokka because who doesn't love pictures of
Quokkas? We need more pictures of Quokkas. Yeah,
so I'm using both Azure functions and the Azure cognitive services for that one
as well as the Twillio communications API APIs.
So at the moment I have WhatsApp working.
I'm trying to integrate their SendGrid API at the moment,
and I'm really hoping to get that done before my talk, but we'll,
we'll see how it go. Otherwise,
I'll hopefully get that done soon so people can email in pictures and it will
tell them if there's a Quokka in them. This is a service the world never knew,
never knew it needed. I have actually had someone,
I mentioned it on Twitter and my, what is a Quokka bot, and why do,
did I never know that I needed this? That's exactly right we need a Quokka bot.
It's very good. That's very cool. I'm going to go and see Amy's talk. Um, yeah,
I have to now this, there's Quokkas involved. Um, so thanks very much Amy.
Appreciate it. And if you want to get started with Azure, um,
check out A Cloud Guru. We have tons of, um,
courses on well fundamental of Azure, essentially. So thank you. No worries.
Thanks.
[inaudible].