Personal reflections, experiences, and my journey in technology
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My journey with AI tools has followed a pattern I've seen before with Microsoft: someone builds something useful, then Microsoft makes it native to where you already work. That turns out to matter more than being technically superior. Today, the GitHub Copilot app launched into public preview, and it's the clearest expression of that pattern I've seen yet.
I've always been more interested in the plumbing of the internet than the web pages sitting on top of it. Every time you load a page, your packets hop across a patchwork of independent networks called Autonomous Systems (ASes), each with its own ASN (Autonomous System Number). Who connects to whom, and how, is what I wanted to map. Now that it's so easy to vibe code with AI, any idea or interest can be turned into a project in minutes. So I built an interactive map of the internet's AS-level topology, and here's how it works and what it shows.
MVP Summit is a lot. Hundreds of MVPs from all over the world descend on Redmond for a week, and within the first few hours you've already lost count of the people you've met. Business cards feel a bit old-fashioned, and in a room full of tech people I wanted something a bit more fun. So I made a small batch of 3D printed keyrings with NFC stickers on the back - tap one with a phone and you land straight on my Linktree.
I also encouraged everyone I gave one to to reprogramme it with their own details. That way it's not just a novelty - it becomes a useful thing they'll actually keep on their keys and use themselves. Here's how I made them.
This week I visited the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington for MVP Summit. Most of what happens at Summit is under strict NDA, we meet product teams, hear about the roadmap, and give often-unvarnished feedback. But alongside those sessions, we got to explore the campus itself, which carries decades of tech history in its buildings and corridors. I visited the Microsoft Archives, which was fascinating, but the highlight was a tour of the Inclusive Tech Lab.
We've all heard it: "This meeting could have been an email." It's the refrain of busy people everywhere, a shorthand complaint about time wasted in unnecessary synchronous discussion.
But, if you are really trying to optimise your processes to ensure that there is minimal friction, there's a better version of that complaint. And it points to something more important than just saving calendar space.
"This meeting could have been code."
Way back in the heady days of 2008 when I was working at a sub-prime mortgage lender (true story, it was us) we had a fella who was 'the MI guy' - his job was to produce some lovely management information reports that told the leadership team how well we were doing at lending money to people who couldn't pay it back. While I had quite a bit of involvement in networks we were a small team so I looked after a lot of the server tin as well back then, and that meant changing backup tapes and that sort of stuff (as was the fashion in those days).
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.
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'.
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.
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.