If you are looking for meaningful ways to contribute during these challenging times, this post explains how I am leveraging my role at Microsoft to support the Hack the Crisis virtual hackathon. I am forming an internal team to tackle community challenges and serving as a mentor alongside my colleague Mikko Viitaila, encouraging you to register and join us in making a tangible positive impact.

After finding my premium headset tiring during long days of back-to-back meetings, I switched to the Plantronics Calisto 7200 speakerphone to enjoy hands-free flexibility without the physical discomfort. In this review, I share my experience with its simple setup, reliable connectivity, and neutral audio quality, highlighting how it has become a practical solution for my home office workflow.

Having worked remotely since 1997, I share my experience building the perfect remote workstation using Microsoft Azure’s DevTest Labs for superior productivity and control. I walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up your own cloud-based environment, from creating resource groups to configuring automatic shutdowns, so you can achieve a reliable and efficient virtual workspace.

If you are interested in Azure Governance, join me and Stephane Lapointe from ShareGate for an upcoming webinar sharing our insights and reflections. We will host this hour-long session on Tuesday, March 31, at noon EDT, so be sure to sign up to hear our discussion.

I show you how I evolved my Raspberry Pi weather monitoring system to display real-time Azure data on a Sense HAT LED matrix, all housed in a custom LEGO case. By using Azure Logic Apps to retrieve latest temperature readings from a SQL database, I created an efficient setup that alerts me to high temperatures while reviving my passion for building with LEGOs.

I share the specific quirks of my tech toolkit that drive me crazy, from Microsoft Edge’s inability to support local avatars to the maddeningly persistent Windows taskbar flashes. While these may seem like minor annoyances, I hope venting about them helps me move on and might even inspire the developers behind these tools to implement the fixes I so desperately need.