At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we sat down with our old friend Anthony Bartolo to discuss the industry’s shift from traditional infrastructure roles to development, a transition heavily influenced by AI and automation.
As companies increasingly adopt “vibe coding” — the trend where developers focus on rapid prototyping and intuition-driven coding rather than rigid syntax — Anthony’s journey is a perfect example of how infrastructure professionals are embracing this new paradigm. He shared his experience moving from network engineering to full-stack development, and how AI tools helped bridge knowledge gaps. This aligns with vibe coding’s emphasis on leveraging AI-assisted development to lower entry barriers, allowing generalists to build functional applications without deep technical expertise. The discussion highlighted how AI is democratizing software creation, empowering both infrastructure specialists and non-traditional coders to build solutions quickly. While AI lowers the barrier to entry, it also raises questions about shallow expertise and long-term sustainability. Are we building real solutions or just stitching together AI-generated snippets with no real understanding?
Anthony Bartolo is a Principal Cloud Advocate Lead with over 10 years at Microsoft. He specializes in AI, cloud solutions, and security, helping organizations leverage Microsoft Cloud to solve complex challenges. His mission is to empower customers, partners, startups, and students by making technology accessible and impactful, with a focus on community engagement and diversity and inclusion (D&I). You can connect with Anthony on LinkedIn
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A special thanks to the folks from ENow Software for helping us out with a location to record this episode.
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This episode is sponsored by Progress. As the trusted provider of the best products to develop, deploy and manage high-impact applications, Progress enables customers to build the applications and experiences they need, deploy where and how they want and manage it all safely and securely. Hundreds of thousands of enterprises, including 1,700 software companies and 3.5 million developers, depend on Progress to achieve their goals—with confidence. Learn more at www.progress.com.