Episode 301 – Celebrating 300 with Andrew Connell & Julie Turner: Community, Podcasting & The Human Connection
Jason and John marked their 300th episode milestone (even if they accidentally blew past it) by bringing on the people they credit for starting their podcasting journey: Andrew Connell and Julie Turner of the Code.Deploy.GoLive show. What followed was less about technical features and more about community, human connection, and why in-person events still matter in an increasingly virtual world.
The Origin Story: How AC Started It All
“I firmly have always blamed AC and CJ for that,” Jason confessed about starting the BIFocal podcast. Andrew Connell and Chris Johnson ran the Microsoft Cloud Show for eight years, producing 450 episodes before dropping the bomb on their final show: “Yeah, we’re done. This is the last show.”
Their podcast inspired multiple others, including the BIFocal Show and the MS Cloud IT Pro Show (still running strong at 400+ episodes). When AC and CJ shut down, Andrew admitted missing the medium: “There’s this void that I didn’t know existed.”
Now Andrew partners with Julie Turner on Code.Deploy.GoLive—a video and audio show focused on full-stack developers building cloud-native enterprise solutions. Critically, “Microsoft” isn’t in the name by design.
“We don’t want to be limited in that,” Andrew explained. “There’s a reason why Microsoft isn’t in the name.” While their deep histories in Microsoft 365 and Azure skew content that direction, they want flexibility to cover the broader cloud-native developer landscape.
Julie Turner, partner and CTO at Sympraxis Consulting (a six-person bespoke consulting firm), joined Andrew after extensive M365 implementation and extensibility work. The pair took nine months from initial conversations at Dallas TechCon to actually launching—prompting Julie’s deadpan: “It took you nine months to get your shit together.”
Small World Connections
The conversation revealed remarkable origin stories. Jason and Julie missed working together at the same company by mere weeks—Mike Gilronan connected them for coffee, calling Julie someone Jason “needed to know.” They became instant friends and fellow foodies.
Andrew and Jason grew up in the same town with overlapping friend circles but never met until SharePoint conferences. “There are pictures of where AC’s like, ‘Yeah, this is me at your graduation,'” Jason laughed. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s my class ring.’ I’m cut out of the picture in that picture.”
John and Jason met through Twitter interactions before Jason—sick at a SharePoint conference in Toronto—spotted “this giant Canadian walking into a room, who is that with the blonde on each arm?”
“My kids knew,” Andrew interrupted. “John, a big scary Canadian.”
“Giant teddy bear,” Julie added, though she acknowledged the intimidation factor “especially when if you’re only four feet tall.”
Why In-Person Events Still Matter
The group pivoted to discussing why physical conferences remain irreplaceable despite virtual alternatives. Julie shared connecting with a young Venezuelan immigrant working senior help desk who worried about AI taking his job: “We ended up having a really lovely long conversation about him being involved in the community and learning about development.”
“That kind of human connection, I think we can’t understate,” Julie emphasized. “These are my friends. These are my core people that I want to see, want to talk to.”
John identified three critical in-person advantages:
Synchronicity matters. Asynchronous communication (Teams, email) creates lag. Even video calls break down because of focus drift: “I’ve got a screen here and I’ve got a screen here and I’ve got a screen down there and I go, ‘Whoa, what’s that?'”
Social pressure creates engagement. “It’s very rude to not pay attention to someone and have drift off and look at your phone while they’re speaking to you.”
Serendipitous connections happen. The “water cooler effect” creates unexpected conversations you weren’t planning.
Andrew didn’t realize how much he missed it until returning post-COVID. At a Seattle event, speakers gathered in a giant circle in the Sheraton lounge: “I went back to my room and I just kind sat there and I was like, I almost had tears in my eyes. It was just going, there’s this void that I didn’t know existed.”
He highlighted how in-person meetings differ from virtual calls: “When we do stuff like this, when we have a call, the call starts and about 50-50 I would say, you’re coming straight from another call. So there’s a context which you come into it. When you sit down, you’re talking in person, you are so much more present and immersed in it.”
Julie went full electrical engineer on the topic: “There is an aspect of energy, like your energy around somebody else’s energy changes the dynamic… I believe strongly in energy and the energy of cells. So there you go. It’s all based on science, dammit.”
Conference Culture & Community Building
Jason shared how one attendee (Sam) impressed everyone by immediately introducing himself and networking aggressively. John ran into him during an “ask the experts” session: “We went back and forth and back and forth probably for 20, 25 minutes there. It was great.”
The conversation touched on expanding community connections beyond conferences—Jason invites community friends to Bar Mitzvahs and family events. “We need more of this. We need more of just getting together as people.”
Julie continues organizing CollabDays New England (October 17th in Waltham/Burlington)—the seventh year consolidating what used to be separate SharePoint Saturdays across New Hampshire, Boston, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Registration is strong with solid sponsorship.
Podcast Reality Check
Andrew’s honesty about podcast commitment resonated. After announcing eight years and 450 episodes were ending, he confessed to friends: “I got in front of my skis. I was really ambitious. I didn’t look two weeks down the road and go, ‘Oh my God, I got so much stuff on my plate, how am I going to do this?'”
John and Jason’s 300-episode milestone prompted reflection on consistency. “Just to be consistently putting out a show on a week to week or biweekly basis, however often you want to do it, it’s good. It’s really good. I love this medium.”
The audio-only format offers relief from video production demands. Jason: “We did about 12 episodes where it was on YouTube and Lyman produced it. And man, that’s a lot of work.”
Platform Flexibility & Vendor Trust
The technical discussion touched on multi-cloud strategies. John described architecting a Fabric-core system that remains portable: “The architecture itself should be portable to anywhere else. It may run best on Fabric based on a bunch of requirements, but it should deploy out to various clouds.”
Andrew agreed: “You want to pick a vendor that you have trust with and you have confidence with, and they give you the features and the feature suite that you need to be able to solve the problem. But you don’t have to… if you’re going to be married to one vendor, I mean good luck these days.”
Jason encounters the question constantly: “Why would I want to do all of these things in Fabric? I don’t care where you do it, as long as you do the things that make the most sense… Let’s figure out the right solution for things rather than playing ‘Which stock ticker am I really tying myself to these days?'”
Zero-Based Array Humor
When wrapping, Andrew noted they recorded episode 301 when intending to celebrate 300. His developer humor saved the day: “It’s okay because you got two developers in here and we’re always off by one, so zero-based ordinality.”
Julie jumped in: “This is technically episode 300.”
Andrew doubled down: “It’s not our fault you put us in 301, Julie and I are thinking 300, so we’re good on the zero.”
The celebration may have been one number off, but the connections—decades in the making, maintained through conferences, podcasts, and occasional hospital visits to the American medical system—remain the real milestone worth marking.
Links:
- Code.Deploy.GoLive Podcast
- Sympraxis Consulting
- Voitanos (Andrew Connell)
- CollabDays New England – October 17, 2025
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