Julie Lerman

Bio

I've been building software solutions for businesses for nearly 30 years and now focus on helping development teams plan and architect their software. I'm a Microsoft Regional Director (one of about 150 around the world) with strong ties to a number of teams at Microsoft. I've also been recognized as a Microsoft MVP since 2003 for my technical expertise and my community involvement. In 2018, I was made a member of the [Docker Captains] (https://www.docker.com/docker-captains) program.

In addition to coaching software teams, I present at software conferences around the world on Microsoft technologies with a focus on Entity Framework and Azure services and am excited to be leveraging Microsoft's new direction with cross-platform and open source technologies. My speaking engagements and mentorship also lean heavily on practices from Domain-Driven Design and even talks to share some of the wisdom I've gained over the years.

I am the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and many popular videos on Pluralsight.com.

While participating in a truly global community, my heart belongs to the tech community in Vermont. I founded the Vermont.NET user group in 2002 and we continue to have monthly meetings all these years later. The .NET community fostered a variety of other tech communities and many of them share our meetup which is over 1500 strong. I initiated the Vermont Code Camp in 2009 and continue to be a lead co-organizer annually. Our code camp is now an annual event drawing nearly 200 attendees and speakers across a wide variety of technology stacks and entices quite a few people from other parts of the country to participate as well. I was a founding board member of the Vermont Software Developer Alliance and served on the board for its first 3 critical years. VTSDA has morphed to the Vermont Technical Alliance and is an important player in the Vermont technical business community. I am also an Executive Fellow of BTVIgnite, a partner of USIgnitewhose mission is to spark next-gen applications in gigabit enabled communities across the United States.

Feel free to contact me about working with your team on site, remotely or even in Vermont where I live, if you'd like an excuse to visit my beautiful state.

Talk to me about: Software Architecture, Software Development Domain-Driven Design, Data Access, Entity Framework, .NET, Cross-Platform .NET, SQL Server, Azure SQL, Azure DocumentDB, Web APIs, NodeJs, Aurelia, Women in IT

Spotlight

As Microsoft has been embracing cross-platform technologies, I noticed many .NET developers were concerned about Microsoft losing focus on them. As a long-time Windows platform developer, myself, I decided to “take the plunge” on their behalf. So, I purchased my first Apple computer, learned how to use it and started writing .NET applications using Visual Studio Code – right on OS X. I loved the reactions of my techie friends who saw me whipping out a MacBook, typing some bash commands and deploying to Docker on Azure!

The novelty of being able to debug and run .NET and C# apps in OS X was fun, but also enlightening. I now frequently use both OS X and Windows in Pluralsight and Channel 9 videos, podcast interviews, conferences and articles to teach .NET developers two important things: first, that Microsoft isn’t abandoning Windows or asking us to do so. Instead, other developers can now share in the coding experiences that we are so proud of: .NET, C# and powerful IDEs. And second, that .NET Framework and Visual Studio continue to evolve.

I’ve been fortunate to leverage my reputation to assure Windows developers that .NET and Windows programming remain a smart investment and career path.