I’m the Founder and CEO of responsiveX, a Microsoft Azure MVP, a Microsoft Regional Director, a regular conference speaker, and the co-author of Step-by-Step Azure SQL Database from Microsoft Press. I’m so passionate about cloud, mobile and modern applications, that I founded responsiveX, a technology company that helps customers deliver great web, mobile, and enterprise apps using the cloud and Azure. I launched my technology career almost two decades ago with a web development startup and have served in multiple roles since including developer, architect, consultant, technology executive and business owner.
I’m an expert in Microsoft technologies and tools starting with ASP Classic 1.0 and VB 5 to the current .NET Framework, C#, W* Foundations and Azure. I’m even commissioned by Microsoft to lead a weekly training webinar for Azure.
What I do
On a day to day basis I’m mostly working on designing and building solutions for clients. I work with other technology firms needing expertise on Azure and cloud services as well as enterprise organizations that need a turn key solution for mission critical systems.
Outside of client work I speak at technology conferences and local meetup groups. I’m a regular speaker for VS Live, THAT Conference, and in 2019 I spoke at Microsoft Build. I am a technology enthusiast, and I enjoy sharing with others about the exciting things we’re doing. And I love to teach others how to do similar things in their organization.
I’ve you’re interested in learning more about the type of work that I do and the knowledge that I share from those experiences you can checkout my blog at ericboyd.com/blog.
My history
The other facet of my career that I thoroughly enjoy is “the startup”. I love entrepreneurship and business startups, especially when it’s a tech startup. I kicked off my technology career by starting a web design firm. This was a great way to get exposure to a number of diverse business models and assist with their marketing efforts.
During this time, the dotcom boom of the late 90’s was developing and I was recruited to work for a transportation-related dotcom startup. This was one of the pinnacle times of my career. We assembled an amazing, passionate, unique team of leadership, IT professionals, software developers, designers, customer service reps and sales reps. We worked round the clock together, played video games together, consumed loads of pizza and caffeinated beverages together and in the end we produced a killer dotcom property. Unfortunately, the dotcom boom became the dotcom bubble and the bubble burst.
Immediately after the transportation dotcom, I started a tech company with another exciting team of individuals. Our company produced business and developer focused software and provided software development consulting services. This team of talented developers, designers and business professionals worked together for 5 years and had lots of exciting times. We not only worked together but we spent a lot of time hanging out away from the office. We had lots of all-nighter client projects and all-nighter Halo parties too. BTW – I have lots of room for improvement with Halo.
And then, after that exciting ride, I circled back to transportation again. I became the Senior Director of IT for a company that transports heavy-duty trucks across all of North America and was responsible for IT and the software development efforts that facilitated operations and drove innovation for the organization.
After all of that adventure, I recently got back into the consulting business and launched a new management and technology consultancy, responsiveX.
I am originally from Southwest Missouri which is where I spent most of my life. However, a few years ago, my wife Shelly and I moved to the Chicago-Milwaukee Megalopolis. And we truly love both Chicago and Milwaukee and have a great deal of fun living here. The City of Chicago is beautiful with great culture and Summerfest in Milwaukee, the world’s largest music festival, is tough to beat. We have two sons, Jaxon and Xander who have greatly enriched my life and given me a deep love and happiness that I didn’t even know was possible.
So that is a little summary of my history and background. My intent here is to share information about emerging technologies, awesome events and helpful advice from my experiences and endeavors with business, technology and Windows Azure. I hope this is a place for you to provide feedback and enables dialog with the community too.