Community Champion - September 2021

James Cook James Cook - @OfficialCookJ

About

James Cook is an Infrastructure Analyst who is currently changing careers and moving into a DevOps Engineer role in September.

Over the past 10+ years, James has worked in many roles within the tech industry. His first opportunity in tech was during his A Level studying where he was able to work alongside the schools IT team. Once his A Level studies were completed, James was accepted into an Advance IT Academy for five months where he would focus on practical skills as well as CompTIA and Microsoft certifications. During his last week at the IT Academy James applied, interviewed, and was offered the position of Technical Consultant at a Not-for-Profit education company. Here James moved up the ranks and took technical lead on the company’s growing services such as Apple MDM/OSX and Google Workspace, moving into the position of Technical Architect.

James has spent the past 18 months reskilling with Microsoft Cloud technology. He has attained expert certifications, implemented new technologies and learnt new practices such as DevOps. He is now contributing back to the community he learnt from.

Community

James used community content to grow his knowledge of Cloud and DevOps. At a point in his studies, he decided to start giving back what he can to help others who are on the same journey. James’s ability to document deployments and procedures is a skillset highlighted in every position he held. As such, his first content contribution was a post on his newly created blog Cloud and DevOps with James Cook (jamescook.dev). James set out a plan to release one post every week, using notes and projects he’s been working to write articles and how to instructions.

His blog has been visited by over thirteen thousand readers in the past six months and his post highlighted in Microsoft’’s Azure DevOps weekly post.
James Cook

Some months passed and James wanted to be more involved in the community than just writing technical posts. James went on Twitter, shared an idea which got a very good reaction from other individuals from the community. A few days later the AZ Community Roundtable twitter.com/azroundtable podcast was created, ran on Twitter Spaces live and recorded for distribution on other podcast platforms. As host of the show, James invites two guest speakers from the Microsoft Azure community to discuss their individual talking point they prepared before the show. Doesn’t matter what your skillset are, James invites anyone who has worked with Azure and has a topic to discuss.
James Cook

James continues to grow his community contributions, participating in community events and shows. He has recently launched a Discord server for content creators of Microsoft products (60+ members) so others can collaborate and help one another grow.
James Cook

Other amazing stuff

James is working on creating content for his YouTube channel. He is releasing weekly YouTube Shorts on projects he is working on as part of a DevOps role.
James Cook

Finally, James recently took up golf and sets aside time away from the computer to switch off and recharge.

Contact Info