Thoughts on cloud technology, engineering leadership, and the ideas worth exploring.
I've been keeping a running OneNote for years. Things that catch my eye. Quotes that land. Principles I want to hold onto. I never thought of it as a knowledge graph. But it turns out it was - just one I couldn't see properly until I handed it to a model and asked what it noticed...
Andrej Karpathy published a gist this week describing a pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs - not retrieval at query time, but a persistent, compounding wiki that the LLM maintains over time...
This makes my inner geek so, so happy! Those that know me will know that the fifth element is one of my all time favourite films...
Richard recently built a website using GitHub Copilot. I built one using GitHub Spark. Visually, they came out almost identically. Two different tools, two different people, two different approaches - and yet the output looked like the same hand had made both.
This is a test post to confirm that video posts render correctly in the blog listing and detail page.
I recently rebuilt my personal site from scratch - blog, podcast, knowledge graph, and an AI-powered chat feature using Microsoft's NLWeb protocol. From the first architectural decision to the moment it all worked, this is the full engineering story, including 13 hard-won lessons.
It is difficult not to miss the fact that a large portion of the current conversation around AI has been focused on the race to build/improve frontier models. That focus has started to shape the ph...
I spent the day at the Azure AI Tour in London. The day started with a somewhat tortuous queue(!) and once in, the realisation that finding/meeting folk will be a thing of chance rather than intent...
What does a donut wall, an Octocat and the awesome April Yoho all have in common?! Well, of course they were all at the same place today...
A week away from the usual cadence of work, a stack of books, and an unexpected progression from structure, to perspective, to execution, to systems thinking.
Recently I've just ticked over to 3 years at IBM, and how time flies! Normally I would have done a bit of a recap of this year, but rather I've been pretty quiet over the last couple of weeks.
Book two of the holiday: The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin - and what a pleasant surprise it turned out to be...
Taking some time out in sunny Ibiza this week with my daughter, with the first book being the long-overdue PITCH by Danny Fontaine...
A little while ago I shared my exploits in creating a very simple local application on my Copilot+ device using the local NPU and the Phi Silica model...
For the majority of my career, I've been the infrastructure guy. The one who sees how things fit together and spots gaps where things could be better...
Almost three years ago I swapped a blue Microsoft badge for an IBM one - joining IBM with one clear goal: to help unlock the full power of the Microsoft ecosystem for our clients. Yesterday, that journey came full circle...
Recently I was involved in a situation where a Red Hat Enterprise Linux build destined for Azure was not working as hoped, there was an .iso of an specialised build that had already been created, b...
I see so many thought leadership posts, many fascinating but also unfortunately, many clearly not being grounded in hard won personal experiences. These experiences can be as significant as running...
As you may have seen yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the AI Tour at the ExCel in London yesterday. As much as I was tempted to share yesterday, I wanted to sit back and refle...
This morning I was walking our dog Saffie when I saw what at first glance looked like a ghostly apparition...
With only a couple of weeks until Christmas, I turned on my well-trodden seasonal background and set off on a small AI experiment...
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity" - we all have busy lives, busy careers, and yet in and amongst this, opportunities present themselves that are often missed...
A bit late posting due to a busy week last week, but nevertheless, wanted to share this. I was fortunate enough to attend the CogX AI Summit a week ago now, held at the Royal Albert Hall, having ne...
In the world of business, we're often trained to seek answers-better solutions, faster processes, bigger growth. But what if, sometimes, the most effective strategy isn’t in finding the answer, but...
As I sit atop a rooftop in Tenerife, huddled under an umbrella for shade, I find myself having a moment of solitude, much like I did in Seattle several years ago. I'm on the 7th floor of the hotel,...
Where has the time gone?! Two years at IBM has flown by! Being at the heart of the Microsoft transformation here at IBM has been both hugely rewarding and to be fair, quite frustrating at times whe...
TLDR; I spent far too much time trying to create a fine-tuned "J.D. Meier" skilled LLM model using Python, RAG gave me what I wanted in minutes....
Let me paint a picture: there is a live project, the team have been struggling for six to eight weeks with a workload that just won't work after being migrated to the cloud...
So following my recent post about Windows Server Being 30 years old and subsequent discussion on what would be your book title would be best describing your IT journey to date, I have been digging ...
So spured on by Richard Jones's fabulous posts, I've been experimenting with nanoGPT, getting it running on my Windows 11 machine wasn't too traumatic and before I knew it - thanks to the fabulous ...
I was out walking our dog early this morning, as I have been for the last couple of months since my wife seriously broke her ankle a week before Christmas...
As a Welsh speaker living in England who has tried to get his kids speaking Welsh, this piece of cognitive science hit close to home...
What a start to MS Ignite this week. I have seen a lot of technology announcements over the years, but I don't think anything has stopped me in my tracks quite like seeing Azure AI Art in action for the first time - and then actually creating something myself...
It's been a while since I've done a video, so I took the opportunity to document my first journey into the IBM London offices - which, as I very quickly discovered, are in a quite remarkable location...
It's Monday the 4th of July - historic for so many reasons for my colleagues out in the US, but for myself it is historic for a completely different reason...
I've been asked a few times now what my home setup is - so I put together a video walking through the full thing, including the camera that was literally balanced on the table...
Andy Winskill asked how I go about creating my videos for the 30-day challenge - so here's a behind-the-scenes look at the process...
A little while ago whilst looking for new things to help my learning/growth I stumbled across a free course called Storytelling For Change by the Acumen Academy. I thought it looked interesting and...
It's half term and my family and I are heading to the depths of West Wales in the UK, to a tiny city called - St Davids. Travelling the weekend that storm 'Boris' was due to arrive meant potentiall...
Here I am, am atop the Space Needle in Seattle, marvelling at the accomplishment made in building the structure and looking down upon little squares of buildings that make up the city of Seattle. I...
It's a marathon, not a sprint - I heard this today, and as we are all aware, is a very well trodden saying. However, today I wanted to put a different spin on it, one that highlights the potential ...
A recent LinkedIn article in conjunction with behaviours I've seen in the industry set me to thinking this week. As part of our work personas we have areas of focus, things we want to improve upon,...
Listening to a TED Talk on the way to customer site today - 'What to trust in a "post-truth" world by Alex Edmans. Whilst clearly not targeted at IT, many of the principles remain the same to archi...
Walking around Tenby on Monday 10th 2018 was tough, not because I hurt physically (well I did!) but instead it was seeing everyone who tamed the dragon on Sunday wearing their finisher t-shirts - y...
For those of you who don't know, just before Christmas last year I took the decision to make a change - a change to be more healthy, a change that would drive me to my limits, a change that involves completing a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a 26.22-mile marathon near where I grew up in West Wales...
I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk 'The Danger of a Single Story' earlier this week and I keep coming back to it. If you have not seen it, go and watch it - it is about twenty minutes and it is genuinely one of the best things I have come across in a long time...
This is a really interesting video. One man looks at a problem and creates a innovative solution, this is perceived to give him an unfair advantage and he has to create a new solution, and again th...
Microsoft published 'The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society' this week, and I have spent most of today and this evening reading through it. It is a thoughtful and at times surprisingly candid piece of writing from a company that is...
The latest Windows build dropped this week with a genuinely surprising number of updates - but the one I keep thinking about is the introduction of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is not a small...
So a chance sighting of an e-mail by my wife late Monday evening has uncovered a compromised family BT Internet mailbox. It's actually been quite an interesting (if somewhat stressful!) process to ...
This is a good read. Though the following paragraph jumped out to me:
Today at Future Decoded in London, Microsoft made an announcement that I have been waiting to be able to share with customers for a long time. UK datacenters for Office 365, Azure, and Dynamics CRM are coming. This is a genuinely big deal...
I am not going to pretend I handled today with any dignity whatsoever. Wales have done it. Grand Slam. Six Nations Champions. I shouted at the television, I may have woken the neighbours, and I have absolutely no regrets about any of it...
You get used to a certain rhythm in the office. Coffee machine, morning catch-ups, emails. What you do not usually expect is to find a Formula 1 racing car parked next to the biscuit tin. But that is exactly what greeted me this week...
I am wrapping up what has been an excellent week at TechEd Europe here in Berlin. Four days of back-to-back sessions, a few too many late evenings, and more Exchange 2010 content than you can shake a...