Our April champion is Mikael Krief … again … for his continued passion to deliver value to our users

We are pleased to re-introduce Mikael Krief in our series of posts to recognise the champs of the Ranger community, one year after Our April champion is Mikael Krief, for his tenacity and passion with the generator-vsts-extension.

He’s been nominated for his continued tenacity and passion to improve our VSTS extensions, research ways to improve our DevOps mindset, and for taking ownership of extension incidents to improve the user experience.

In addition, he continues to share his ideas, passion, and learnings with colleagues at the MVP2MVP day, prior to the MVP Global Summit.

We asked Mikael a few questions

• What do you eat for breakfast? In the morning I like to eat a good breakfast well balanced, for example with coffee, jam on toast and fruit that I eat on the way to work.
• Why are you so passionate about extensions and feature flags? What I liked about the VSTS extensions was to be able to integrate our own business needs into the VSTS interface whether through hub, widget or even build/release tasks and this by simply using the APIs and UI controls provided by Microsoft.
  With that comes the Marketplace which allows us to share our extensions publicly and to get feedback from users.
  With features flags we added an additional value to the extension that allows us to have a better Control on the features we deploy. The best example I can cite is with the features flags the user can choose if he wants to display the logs or then we can enable or disable the telemetry by changing the value of the feature flags without having to redeploy the extension.
• What’s next? The next step which I think I will be a real challenge is to integrate our features flags solution on other extensions, and thus to be able to discover again case of use of features flags but also it will encourage to make evolve our extensions with new functionalities.
• What have been your key learnings around the FF/AzureFx/Roll-Up projects?
  I learned so much about these three areas that it would be difficult to name them all.
  On Azure Functions, I learned everything with this project, from their development to their deployment in a DevOps process. And a few days ago I learned how to monitor them and optimize their performance.
  And as for the Features flags I also learned all about their purpose and development method. In addition to that, I discovered a great product which is LaunchDarkly and their team with whom we work daily and with whom we have a very good relationship.
  From assembling all these technologies, I learned (and am still working on ) how to develop and deploy components with backwards compatibility.

Wondering what the nomination had to say about Mikael?

Mikael continues to present at the MVP2MVP day to share learnings, debug the Launch Darkly performance issue, upgrade multiple extensions for GDPR, and clean up the telemetry package. Not an easy feat when trying to balance our family>job>rangers mantra. His most recent How we checked and fixed the 503 error and Performance issue in our Azure Function demonstrates his passion, attention to detail, and taking ownership of his and other projects from idea to live site incident, with a deliberate focus on the user experience.