9 posts tagged with "Personal"

I was out for a long walk over the weekend and I have now got a rather nasty blister on my heel. If you'd configured a health check just to monitor my feet, I'd be marked as dead right now.

Since Anthropic open sourced the Model Context Protocol last year there have been lots of notable implementations across many areas of tech. Every day I seem to see a breathless introduction on LinkedIn to some new MCP front end to a service or dataset.

So here's something I definitely didn't see coming when I started my blog, I just got the email that I've been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status for Cloud and Datacenter Management - On-Premises Networking.

The Arctic wind whipped across my face as I looked up at the entrance of what might be humanity's most important insurance policy. It has been a place that has fascinated me since I read a New Scientist article about it many years ago, and there I was, staring at the concrete wedge jutting from the mountainside, its façade glittering with an art installation that catches the summer Arctic sunlight.

Introduction: Beyond the Basics​

FizzBuzz has long been a staple of programming interviews. The problem is deceptively simple: print numbers from 1 to n, but replace multiples of 3 with "Fizz", multiples of 5 with "Buzz", and multiples of both with "FizzBuzz". It's not meant to be a challenging algorithmic puzzle; most candidates with basic programming knowledge should solve it without difficulty.

So why does this trivial problem persist in the interview landscape? Because I believe FizzBuzz's true value isn't in filtering out candidates who can't code—it's in opening discussions about complexity, language characteristics, optimisation, and the subtle costs of different operations. The best interviewers don't just ask candidates to solve FizzBuzz; they use it as a starting point for a deeper technical conversation.

I found an interesting little field hidden in plain sight in Microsoft documentation. A clever chap recently said this to me: 'if you can figure out what problem the engineers were trying to solve then it makes it easier to understand why the product works the way it does'.

Introduction​

I've been asked to explain networks to people with no experience several times and it's hard to know where to start. There's so much history and so many computer science concepts that have led us to where we are today. I've always believed that to truly understand something, you need to be able to explain it to someone else. My goal here isn't just to explain the bits that make the internet work, but also to organise my own understanding and explore areas where I've taken things on faith instead of questioning why they exist. I'll start from nothing and rebuild the internet from scratch, solving the same problems that got us where we are today.

Note for US readers: CV, or Curriculum Vitae, is the standard term in the UK and many other countries for what Americans call a resume. While traditionally a CV might be longer and more detailed than a resume, the terms are often used interchangeably in today's international job market.

Lessons from Personal Tech and Enterprise IT​

Notifications and alerts are everywhere in our always-on, connected world. But as I've learned from personal experience and my work in enterprise IT, more alerts don't always mean better outcomes. In fact, too many alerts can be completely counterproductive.