[Kevin 00:07]
So Zoe and I recorded a whole load of mini-interviews at the MVP Summit, and we thought rather than build those into a few larger episodes, we'd release those to you in short little snippets like this. So enjoy a set of our interviews live from Seattle with various people from Microsoft and MVPs. So here I am again at the MVP Summit and I have Tom Morgan. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi.
[Tom 00:35]
My name is Tom Morgan. I'm a Microsoft 365 Platform Developer, which means I do things, developing things on Teams, Azure, OCS, all of it, Microsoft 365 really.
[Kevin 00:46]
And you're also famous for being, generally holding one of these cameras and doing some lovely videos around conferences as well. I'm definitely happier on the other side. So we've got four questions. I'm going to kick off with what does copilot mean to you? That's.
[Tom 00:59]
A good question. About a year ago I had one definition for what I thought copilot meant. Now I have many. For me, though, it is taking out some of the stuff that I know I would, like, it's just a pain to do, you know. That's where I find copilot the most valuable as well. I know what the answer is already, but I can sort of eyeball. This is mostly code I'm talking about. I use Copilot a lot in code and it will suggest some code.
[Kevin 01:25]
Is that GitHub Copilot?
[Tom 01:27]
Yeah, I use GitHub Copilot a lot. For me, that's the primary use case.
[Kevin 01:32]
But.
[Tom 01:33]
More and more I'm starting to use it generatively outside of code. Right, yeah. Modern workplace stuff. Interesting. So yeah. Interesting. No, you go.
[Kevin 01:43]
So this may kind of come onto this, but what are your experiences with Copilot that made a difference?
[Tom 01:48]
Yeah, I think sometimes it's... I had this really good experience actually where I had to do this horrible project in a language I didn't understand, so just because of various reasons, I was having to.
[Kevin 02:01]
Do it in a coding language. We don't talk about multi-language at Copilot, that causes trouble.
[Tom 02:08]
Yeah, I just completely wasn't familiar with it at all, but actually GitHub Copilot stepped me through it in a really interesting way, where I could say, this is the code I want to write in a sort of vaguely sudo.net sort of thing, and actually I want you to write it for me in Java. And it was like, okay, you need to go and get some packages, because if we don't do this here, a net would look like this, and, you know, it was just actually really interesting. And also to the point of like, which packages do I need to go and get? Well you've got some options, you could do this, you could do that. So actually, as a developer who has very little experience other than doing it at the University of Java, I could go and figure that stuff out.
[Kevin 02:49]
You'd have to get moving. That is intriguing because we talk a lot about levelling the playing field in the M365, but it's doing the same in the developer bit, so interesting. So, is there anything that you're worried about when it comes to co-pilots? Apart from it taking your job by the sound of things, but...
[Tom 03:05]
There's, on the flip side of that, the interesting point and where I said earlier that I think it's useful for where you kind of already know what you want to do, you do have to be careful. And I'm not really sure whether this is something that's going to get better, but sometimes like Copilot will just throw in like a function name that just doesn't exist, you know. And confidently, like, it just looks like it should do, but because of the nature of how live language models work, like sometimes it puts that in. And so you've kind of got to be on that a little bit to be like, oh, it's not that the The whole code is terrible when it doesn't compile. It's like, there's a function name here, and you just go and look it up, and it's like, oh, no, there is no function called that. But that's annoying, because that would be the perfect function to go right there.
[Kevin 03:43]
So I suppose, especially for more junior people coming up who haven't that experience of kind of recognizing when things don't smell right. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, no, that's interesting. And so on the flip side, what are you most excited about seeing next? Realizing that this isn't under NDA, and you can't give anything too much away, so.
[Tom 03:59]
Yeah, I am excited for plugins for Copilot. I think they're very cool. Doing lots of playing around with those.
[Kevin 04:06]
I think that's really interesting.
[Tom 04:08]
But I also think we've got more stuff to figure out and get excited around with using what we currently have in ways that I don't think we've figured out yet. So back to the me learning Java badly through Copilot, actually for junior developers, Copilot could be really interesting for, okay, as a manager of lots of developers, if I have a new junior dev come in, I want to be able to say to Copilot, over our organizational source code repository, then you make up some programming exercises for my junior based on.
[Kevin 04:39]
The code. Interesting, based on your actual code. Based on.
[Tom 04:41]
Not only our code, but our coding.
[Kevin 04:43]
Practices, how we do it here. I like the way you assume that everyone follows those practices, but I like the theory of that. So.
[Tom 04:49]
I can probably help with that too. Yeah.
[Kevin 04:52]
Oh, that's a really interesting idea. No, that would be very good. So, well, thank you very much, Tom. Enjoy the rest of the summit. Thanks, John.
[Tom 04:58]
Thank you.
[Kevin 05:04]
You