Last week I delivered a webinar together with Stephane Lapointe with support from ShareGate on Azure Policy essentials. The webinar walked through the essence of Azure governance, including Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure Managements Groups, and naming and tagging resources. We also took a quick look at Azure Arc, mainly to show how you can… Read More »Azure Policy essentials: The webinar recording is now available
Part of my work at Microsoft is to support and sponsor community- and partner-driven events, and also our own events. We refer to these as 1st party events, and 3rd party events. How this works is that I focus largely on local events – the ones being organized and held in Finland. Even though I’m… Read More »Events are becoming digital-only – and that’s generally a good thing!
It’s been three weeks since we saw drastic measures throughout the EU region to fight the coronavirus situation. In Italy, the situation has been much worse, while in Finland it’s been somewhat easier, in comparison. Yet, in Helsinki, where I live, schools closed in mid-March. While daycares remained open, the strong suggestion was to keep… Read More »Working from Home – reflections during the coronavirus crisis
A few years ago, all customers and partners I met with stated more or less the same introductory sentence, “We build hybrid solutions.” The implication was then, that all solutions would use whatever the customer would have as on-premises, and the extension would come from Office 365 (before Microsoft 365 was announced) and Azure. I… Read More »Building a hybrid governance solution using Azure Arc
The ability to work from home, at the office, in coffee shops and practically anywhere allows you to take your office with you. I’ve worked remotely since about 1997 – that is, I have an office where I can go and work, but I can also choose to work outside the office. Lately, I’ve worked… Read More »What’s in your bag?
In times like these, it’s important to think about how you can help the ones in immediate need within your community and at large. The obvious solution might be to volunteer to help out those in need with your time, resources and skills. Therefore, I was immensely delighted to see that Hack the Crisis, which… Read More »I’m supporting the Hack the Crisis virtual hackathon
About a year ago I wrote about the Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headset I’m using at home (and when traveling). It’s a premium headset with stellar audio quality. I’ve used it for a year and a half now, yet I found them a bit frustrating at times. Occasionally, I have 5 or 8 calls or… Read More »Review: Plantronics (Poly) Calisto 7200, a Bluetooth speakerphone for the home office
A quick note that I’m happy to be a co-host for an upcoming webinar on Azure Governance – insights and reflections together with Stephane Lapointe from ShareGate. The webinar takes place Tuesday, March 31, at noon (EDT). You can sign up here. I might be quite chatty, but we promise to keep this to an… Read More »Upcoming webinar: Azure Governance – insights and reflections
I’ve worked remotely from 1997, or so. Back then, remote work was considered “working overtime in the evening” and I would do my regular 40 hours at the office, plus whatever on top by working remotely. Later, I worked on-and-off remote. For the past few years, I’ve worked more or less fully remotely from home.… Read More »Building the perfect remote workstation in the cloud
I wrote about building a Raspberry Pi-based weather monitoring systems back in July, 2019. The solution utilizes Ruuvitag bluetooth beacons to measure temperatures and other data, and then submits those readings to Azure using Azure IoT Hub and Azure Functions. That setup is still working well today. I also wrote about building a new housing… Read More »Building a Raspberry Pi-based temperature monitoring solution with Sense HAT LED matrix display and Azure Logic Apps (and some LEGO!)
If you work in tech, you’ve possibly internalized that the technologies, services, platforms and tools you have at your disposal are almost limitless and exciting at the same time. I’ve spent a few years building my toolbox so that it gives me immense satisfaction, and brings happiness when I get to work on anything related… Read More »5 things with productivity tools that frustrate me to no end
At home, I run Ubiquity Networks’ Unifi hardware. I wrote briefly about this just recently here, and I also found out the Unifi hardware provides a neat way to generate a network topology map, such as this: In essence, I have the Unifi USG as a firewall, and 3 Unifi 8-port switches around the house… Read More »Building a site-to-site VPN between Unifi network hardware and Azure
The only constant in life is change. And I love it! For me, the ability to accept continuous change is one of my internal KPIs, that I use to playfully measure if I’m still a good fit to work in IT. Each morning when you wake up, something evolved, changed or retired – and it’s… Read More »An update to Microsoft certifications: MCSA, MCSD, and MCSE retiring end of June 2020
We have a Fitbit Aria Scale at home. It was released in April 2012, and being the gadget lover I am, I think I bought this one in May 2012. The idea is great – you step on the scale, it measures your weight, and tries to guesstimate your BMI and other relevant dimensions, and… Read More »Hello, 802.11b – again!
Recent weeks have been busy, and many things have demanded my attention. As a result I haven’t had too much time to build things, and I love to build things. So today, during a coffee break at work, I decided to spend 15 minutes to get something built. And it would need to be something… Read More »Building a command-line utility to search for WordPress content using .NET Core and System.Text.Json