Community

Happy New Year! It’s that time of year again, the time when we all wonder when it’s socially acceptable to say Happy New Year to people we speak to. In all seriousness, I do hope that your 2022 finished in a positive way, or if 2022 was not a good year for you, then I hope 2023 bring you better times ahead. Last year, I fell behind on my blog badly, I hope to do better this year and have more time to blog about things happening in the community, as well as all things DevOps, cloud-native, and software engineering....

This week saw the return of Tech Week Humber for the fourth time. The week long festival of events connects enterprise and education in all areas of tech. I’m incredibly proud to be involved in this years event as it showcases my local city and region. I’m also involved as a member on the Board of Advisors. Tech Expo Oh I’ve missed in-person conferences so much. Thankfully we are now getting back to normal when it comes to conferences, and with that comes the opporunity for networking with others....

Today, I was very pleased to present my session Take Control of Costs with Azure Cost Management which is part of the Azure Spring Clean series. If you missed the first showing of the session, you can watch it again over on my YouTube Channel. My thanks to Joe and Thomas for organising this great event, make sure you check out some of the other content from this week. Cost Management is an important aspect of cloud management and is still one of the top priorities that people talk to me about either as customers, or at user groups and conferences....

The latest episode of the podcast, feature hybrid cloud expert and Senior Manager at Dell, Kenny Lowe. The Cloud Talking is a podcast aimed at getting you closer to members of the community, talking about their career journey, the community, and a guest topic. We start each episode by asking “What do you tell your non-techie friends and family what you do?”. Head over to Anchor to see the episode on your favourite podcast app or listen directly from my blog....

Launching the new podcast which gets you closer to members of the cloud community is Software Architect and serverless enthusiast John Kilmister. The Cloud Talking is a podcast aimed at getting you closer to members of the community, talking about their career journey, the community, and a guest topic. We start each episode by asking “What do you tell your non-techie friends and family what you do?”. Head over to Anchor to see the episode on your favourite podcast app or listen directly from my blog....

Thanks to the kind folks over at Elgato, I was lucky enough to receive a number of products from them, I wanted to use this post to take some time to do a short review of the products I received from them. First of all, I want to provide a quick summary of what I received from Elgato. Elgato Wave:3 Elgato Pop Filter Elgato Shock Mount Elgato Mic Arm LP Elgato Facecam Elgato Stream Deck Mini Elgato Key Light Air Let’s now talk about each of these bundled up by category....

I love the community that I am part of, I can get help from any number of incredibly kind humans who go the extra mile to make sure you get the result you want. Sometimes though, as with everything in life it takes its toll. I wanted to share something more personal with you. It’s just over a year now since I first received my Microsoft MVP award. It’s flown past and I’m, really happy with what I have contributed to various different user groups, conferences, and other mediums in the past 12 months....

For the first time since March 2019, it was conference time! It was so good to be back at an in-person conference. Over the past weekend (15th - 16th October), I was lucky enough to attend the South Coast Summit in Southampton. For me, it was the first in-person event since the Cloud Expo in March 2020 at the Excel in London. This event happened at the start of the pandemic and still went ahead just before the first lockdown in the UK....

As many of you will know, last week, we lost one of the shining lights of our wonderful technical community. Abel Wang (aka. AbelSquidHead), sadly lost his fight against cancer. The deeply personal, yet public post on Facebook about his passing from his wife Nina, is incredibly moving. When I learned the news looking through my Twitter feed, it was awash with people saying goodbye, to a friend, colleague, advisor, and mentor....