Where to start…? 2020 - the rise of the pandemic 2020 saw the whole planet have to deal with Covid19 which impacted almost every sector possible, leaving Tech being one of the few with the least amount of impact. Needless to say I was far far too optimistic about how it would pan out and 2020 was pretty much one of the worst years of my life, & I’ve have some pretty bad ones.

I was lucky enough to be one of the chosen speakers for PSConfEu 2022 which wll take place June 20th - 23rd in Vienna, Austria. I will be speaking about Building a High Quality Resource Module (HQRM) and all the surrounding technology that you need to be able to do so. This isn’t a small presentation in the slightest and has lots of areas to cover, and whilst it will be a lot to cover I am confident that I can manage to get all the right information across for this presentation.

After a good few years with the last rather dated look of this blog as was per below I felt that it was time for a bit of an update. This is especially true as that layout wasn’t really all that responsive (in loading as it was so damn slow or for different devices with different resolutions) and as such for 2022 I wanted a cleaner and much quicker site. Also looking back the site isn’t really all that accessible either which to a much bigger problem to me now than it originally was when I picked that theme.

If you work in a big organisation, or like me, are on a number a of cross organisation distribution lists or listservs, then it’s likely that you have some myriad of email rules that route all emails sent to a specific distribution list to a specific folder. This is a good email management practice as you can then filter your searches to a single folder that should just have conversations related to things sent to that distribution list.

Background The Azure Advent Calendar is a collaboration for members of the International #AzureFamily to contribute a video and blog post about a topic of their choice related to the Azure Public Cloud, which was brought to life by Richard Hooper (aka Pixel Robots) & Gregor Suttie two recent UK Azure MVP’s that make up 23 Azure MVP’s out of a total 164 UK MVP’s of which I am one of in the Cloud and Datacenter Management category.

This post is going to be all about Microsoft Ignite and my experience as both a 1st time attendee & a 1st time speaker. There’s going to be a lot to read so I highly recommend you go get a brew sorted (tea, coffee, beer, wine etc) before sitting down to read this post which at over 2600 words is quite a read, and this is just part 1 of 2 which focuses on the lead up to Ignite & not Ignite itself which will come in Pt2 of this series.

You can tell that the end of year conference season is coming up as we’ve just wrapped up PSDayUK, which was a resounding success! Then this week there are a number of events currently going on, and with some of the Black Marble team, currently at Future Decoded, and some more of the team currently at Techorama Netherlands, this week as well, the office has seemed somewhat quiet. Then next Saturday (12th October) there is DDD @ Microsoft Reading (which I am attending) and then in just a short few weeks is Evolve Conference, where I will be speaking on Making Operational Azure Management a breeze.

Yet again I’ve had another acceptance on a session that I have submitted to a conference, this time to Microsoft’s flagship conference, Ignite, this year taking place between November 4th - 8th 2019 in Orlando, Florida. I’ve been accepted for 2 sessions, a 45 minute Breakout session and a 20 minute theatre session, both of which will be brand new to me sessions, and whilst both are completely non-technical, they are incredibly important topics in the Diversity & Inclusion track, something that I have been trying more and more to be better involved with.

After a good few years with the last rather dated look of this blog as per below I felt that it was time for a bit of an update. Though this also coincided with some software updates that I needed to implement as well so I thought I’d do a rolling update of theme, software and plugins and luckily most of it went ok (this time round) Let me know what you think in the comments

You can tell that it’s the beginning of the conference session confirmation season as I’ve had another acceptance on a session that I have submitted to a conference, this time to the London leg of Microsoft’s Ignite on Tour conference on Feb 26th – 27th at the Excel London. The session that I will be delivering is a new to me session called “Using Azure for Good - the story behind mhasl.