Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?
Yas : Web development, Azure, DevOps, Web performance, Web technologies
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Yas : I was writing my blog posts for quite a while and wanted to cover more areas and at a deeper level. So when I was reached by Packt I thought this is my opportunity to do so. I love Bicep and how it helps people achieve more by doing less, so I started writing the book and before you know it, here we are.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Yas : I’ve been working with ARM templates and Azure for quite a while, so when Bicep got introduced I started writing some blog posts on it. In terms of research I used Azure Docs, Microsoft learn, and ma few friends who are very active on Azure to get their perspective on what they would like to do with Bicep.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Yas : Not specifically, some of the resources I would have liked to use would require a paid subscription so I tried to stick with cheaper services, but overall it was a blast.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Yas : I think Bicep is here to solve many of the issues people are facing when they are setting up their CI/CD pipelines to deploy their resources to Azure. It simplifies the authoring experience by a great deal and gives developers and DevOps engineers the confidence they need to start deploying more regularly.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Yas : This book starts with basics and slowly brings you to a journey on harder topics. It has a good learning curve and is written by a trainer who works for Microsoft and deals with this day to day.
Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?
Yas : First get to know what is Bicep and why you should use it, then learn how to write reusable immutable and idempotence templates which helps you achieve your goals in a very short time.
Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Yas : Learn by doing, just reading the book doesn’t help you become proficient. Start deploying to Azure using Bicep. You can use a Free account which gives you $200 for a year and that’s more than enough to follow all the demos on our GitHub repositories.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Yas : https://yashints.dev
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Yas : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/
Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Yas : It was a fantastic experience. I had all the support I needed and the communication was brilliant.
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Yas : I am part of DDD Melbourne crew and Azure MTT community
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Yas : Computer world, MIT tech review, Geek time and PC mag
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Yas : I had a schedule every night to spend an hour on the book. That helped me have a great work life balance along the way
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Yas : Read your what you write a few days after and reflect on what could be written better. Get someone else to review it as well to have different perspective too
You can find Yas’ book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
