I saw this tweet from @msdev:

https://twitter.com/msdev/status/1546887134728142850

An announcement of a cool set of pathways to ramp up in Azure.

I literally read the first line and thought, Yes! They’re doing that cool thing I’d envisioned a while back. I clicked through to the post. That’s when I saw what I should have seen in the second line of the tweet, “…a ramp-up guide for developers”. Bummer.

I mean, not really, this is vibes. If you head on over to GitHub you’ll see a list of topics and resources that certainly can help you find your way into Azure and the related technologies that would be handy to know as an up-and-coming cloud developer. But I think the time has come for more.

This is my level of progress on Microsoft Learn.

Largely because I’ve not been really interested in building up XP in that way. It’s really easy to watch all my MSFT content on Learn and see the bar move, and yet, I’ve not felt the drive. I’ve been building with Azure for a long time, and so I feel like I know my way around the tech. But, I am curious about new cloud developers and what would motivate them to get more XP. This is where I think an Azure Skills Navigator of some sort could help with that.

What if, just like on Microsoft Learn, when you engage with the content, your XP grows and grows, the same thing happened on the Azure portal? As you configure services, deploy resources and engage the portal, your XP grows, and in fact, your experience around the portal is an altogether guided one - via the Azure Skills Navigator. As you made certain steps, it could recommend articles, and coach you along the way. There could even be a Novice mode and a Pro mode.

Heck, you could even throw in a Stories mode, as developers connected various pieces of Azure in a journey and made that a story. Clearly, I’m going a bit too far. But this is the point, I think that while its great to have yet another guide into cloud tech, it doesn’t go far enough to bring developers into the cloud.

Long live the Azure Skills Navigator - the real one.