Integration Love Story with Mattias Lögdberg

Introduktion

Welcome, Mattias, and thank you for giving us your time today. We’d like to hear more about you.

Thank you very much for having me. My name is Mattias Lögdberg. I’ve been a Microsoft MVP since 2017, and I’m currently running a company called DevUp Solutions where we work with analyzing and reviewing Azure environments — the short answer is more consistent and secure environments. You might also see me at conferences and speaking at events.

Kostymerna — en tradition föds

Our previous guest, Mike Stevenson, has a question about your sessions at Integrate — but first he wants to know: why the suits?

It’s actually quite fun. A friend was doing a conference in Toronto and they bought suits with a beach sunset on the jacket. They got a lot of questions and attention. So I thought I’d try the same idea. I bought a Super Mario suit for Integrate 2023. It was probably the conference where I talked to the most people of all time — a great icebreaker. Then came Pac-Man.

And Mike’s actual question: what’s the end game? What’s the goal suit?

I don’t have a good game plan right now. We’ve been doing video game suits, so I need to find the right next step. I’ll figure something out.

DevUp Solutions — en idé som inte fick plats

Before DevUp, you were a consultant and solution architect. What drove you to start DevUp?

In my last years as a consultant I was often the person thrown into fires to put them out. I did that for a lot of customers at the consultancy firm. During that time I realized that a lot of what I was doing could have been automated.

I actually pitched the idea — what is now Helium, our core service — to that consultancy firm. I thought it would be a great way to increase developer knowledge and raise the quality bar for customers. But they didn’t want it. The business model is consultancy hours, not product.

After some turns in life I just thought: why not try it myself? I started DevUp Solutions in mid-2021, right in the middle of COVID. An interesting start, to put it mildly.

Whiteboard-presentationerna

You’re well known for using whiteboards in your sessions. Why?

When I got my MVP award in late 2017, I managed to get into Integrate 2018 as a speaker. That was a conference I’d attended for five years. My challenge was: how do I do something different, something people will remember, so I can come back year after year?

I found a good story and realized I could tell it with a whiteboard — more interactive, more engaging, more fun. I prepared it for months. Whiteboard sessions are actually harder to do than any PowerPoint session. You need to have much more knowledge at the top of your mind, and you need to practice the drawing and placement carefully. But it worked.

First the whiteboard, then the suits. And the third challenge is coming — the Nordic Integration Summit. Creating our own event. That’s the third one.

Råd till blivande talare

For people thinking about presenting at a conference for the first time, what are your three tips?

First: don’t be afraid. When I started speaking I blacked out every single time. I had 15 to 20 slides for the first 10 minutes just to feel comfortable. You can train this. Find your inner peace — that’s the most important thing. Before a presentation, don’t think about the session. Do something that gives you peace of mind. Give someone a hug. Watch something funny. Keep your head out of the session until you’re on stage.

Second: get comfortable with silence. We hate silence when there are 20 people watching us. The trick is to learn to be comfortable in it. Try counting backwards from 10 in your head — then start talking. It makes you more present for the audience instead of rushing over them. How many times have you seen a speaker keep talking while the audience is still clapping?

Third: preparation — in good time. When I started I prepared the day before, which made things worse and more stressful. If you prepare well in advance on something you’re comfortable with, you show up comfortable. And plan your pauses intentionally — think about when you want the audience to react, how you want them to react, and practice those moments.

Att bekämpa tekniska bränder — var du börjar

When you come into a technical fire, what’s your first move?

I take a step back and try to understand why it happened. A lot of the issues I’ve helped customers resolve relate to networking — DNS, firewalls, routing. My approach is to map it out: where am I, where am I trying to get to, what’s the route? Then go step by step. Am I here? Can I reach this next point? Yes — good. Can I reach the next? If not, that’s where the problem is. Stay calm, go back to basics, and work your way forward step by step.

Sessionen på Integrate 2024 — Nätverk för Azure-integration

Your session at Integrate 2024 was about mastering networking for Azure integration services. Why this topic?

This has been the number one topic in my conversations with customers and partners over the past year. It’s complex, and it’s something developers and architects now need to be deeply involved in — even though many of us thought going to the cloud meant leaving networking behind.

On-premises, the network team handled the network. In Azure, we configure private endpoints, firewall settings, and routing on our own resources. And what I found is that people are often clicking through configuration without understanding what they’re doing. Services are jumping in and out of networks, and nobody realizes it. Part of my session was drawing that out visually — because it’s much more complex than we want to believe.

The best place to start if you want to learn this area is private endpoints. That’s what integration developers most commonly encounter. You don’t need to understand app service environments and the heavy infrastructure pieces — those are typically handled elsewhere. But understanding how a private endpoint connects to a private DNS zone and how traffic flows — that’s essential.

AI i nätverkssammanhang

Where does AI fit into networking?

Two areas come to mind. First, AI is being used for pattern detection in network traffic — identifying suspicious patterns or potential breaches from large volumes of data. That’s already happening.

Second, and more immediately useful for developers: AI is very good at explaining network configuration in human-readable language. Instead of hunting through outdated documentation or trying to remember what a /24 subnet means, you can just ask. That kind of accessible explanation lowers the barrier significantly for people who don’t live and breathe networking every day.

Takeaways från Integrate 2024

What were your biggest takeaways from Integrate 2024?

Two things stood out. First, the investment in bringing cloud capabilities to on-premises or private cloud environments — Logic Apps hybrid, that whole direction. That’s a significant shift.

Second, AI was everywhere. Every product group wants to be part of the AI journey. A lot of sessions focused on how to implement AI in integration solutions. Those two themes dominated the event.

Nordic Integration Summit

You’re involved in organizing the Nordic Integration Summit. Tell us more.

I’m so excited. From the recording date it’s about two weeks away — the first integration conference in Sweden focused on developers and architects.

We started talking about this idea about two years ago. When we looked at the integration community in Sweden we realized: there are a lot of strong people here, a lot of strong companies. Something was missing. Integrate is in June in London — we wanted to create something that complements it, in Sweden, in October.

We’re doing it as a community event on our spare time, a small group of people who genuinely want to do this, want to bring speakers from all over the world to Sweden and give the Swedish and European community a place to connect. It’s community-driven from the beginning.

Integration Love Story

Everyone in the integration community has a love story. Can you tell us yours?

I want to go way back. I was working at a factory as a service technician — fixing machines, that kind of thing. I learned by watching the more skilled consultants who came in and did development on the machines. With permission from my boss, I would try things myself, and I fell in love with the idea that you could automate tasks for the people working on the delivery line.

Then when I started my education in Gothenburg, I found integration. Connecting systems, moving data back and forth — that was where the real fun was. Not building a form where someone saves data to a database. The real satisfaction was when someone filled in a form, that triggered a process somewhere, a packing slip was printed, and two weeks later a customer got a package delivered to their door.

That’s when I fell in love with integration. The best part: I didn’t even know what integration was at the time.

Fråga till näste gäst — Sandro Pereira

Our next guest is Sandro Pereira. What question would you challenge him with?

Two questions. First: what’s the deal with all the Formula 1 pictures circulating in the feed? Second — and this is the real one: why all the hate against Microsoft when you’re on stage?

Thank you so much, Mattias. It’s been a really fun conversation.

Thank you for having me. Good initiative.