Announcing our new Podcast, Ctrl+Alt+Azure - the first episode is out now!

I hinted briefly about a few very exciting projects I’m working on in my recent What’s up post, and one of those projects is out today.

Our new podcast, named Ctrl+Alt+Azure (see the site here), is being launched immediately. I’m producing that together with a friend and fellow Azure MVP, Tobias Zimmergren. As the name quite directly suggests, it will be all about Microsoft Azure.

You can listen to the first episode here, where we talk about Azure Key Vault. You can also subscribe via a number of services for our podcast.

So, why another podcast? Aren’t we already busy as it is? And who is this aimed for?

We’ve scheduled fun and interesting calls with Tobias over Teams, or Skype, or Zoom, to catch up. He lives close to Malmö, Sweden, and I’m in Helsinki, Finland so the time difference is only an hour (to his advantage). We both work primarily from home, so it’s been easy, yet very satisfying to discuss openly on ideas, challenges with Azure and how we both work and approach technical problems.

During one of these calls, I think Tobias suggested that perhaps we should just record these calls, as a lot of what we talked about seemed valuable and insightful.

We then spent a couple of months discussing, planning and envisioning how our podcast should feel, look and sound. Here’s a list of the names we rejected:

Cloud and Coffee
Azure Insights
Azure & Fika
This one time at code camp..
Let Me Explain: Azure
Azure gets better with wine
Azurefuckinglutely
Actively disliking on-premises
Azure is my happy place
Surely Azure
The Last Server
Cloudy with a chance of Azure
Never Reboot
WinKey-Azure
Azurexec.BAT
Practical Azure
Hello Azure!
ECHO OFF Azure
Console.WriteLine(“Azure”);
cd Azure

Some of those we discarded after repeating the name out loud three times. Some simply because they would be impossible to quickly mention during a hallway discussion at a conference. I was personally fond of Never Reboot, but after thinking about that for a week, it felt like it’s from a TV series.

We eventually settled on Ctrl+Alt+Azure. It’s just a little bit geeky, and it brings back great memories from the times when On-Premises and gray servers ruled the world, and you had to occasionally reboot them. There’s even a Finnish play on words for this – ‘buutti kaiken muutti‘, that roughly translates to ‘once rebooted, everything changed.’

We strive to produce a quality discussion on all aspects of Azure – for developers, IT Pros, business decision-makers, and architects. I realize it’s overly ambitious to commit to a strict publishing schedule, but at least for now we aim to have a new episode out every week. This conveniently forces us to keep each episode to a digestible length – optimally around 30 minutes.

Plenty of time was spent on testing different software, publishing models, and how to best schedule recording hours, as we cannot meet in person that often. For now, we’ve got a great process and rhythm, and I’m feeling great about our future episodes!

You can follow the updates for the podcast on Twitter, and we’ll publish new episodes to every reasonable and possible service, such as Spotify, and Player.fm. Some services take a bit of time to surface our podcast, so if it’s not there in your favorite platform, rest assured it will be, Real Soon Now!

I hope you’ll join our journey on Azure through this podcast, and I’m eagerly waiting to record more episodes in the coming weeks!