Ctrl+Alt+Azure Podcast

Our podcast, Ctrl+Alt+Azure (see the site here), was launched in late 2019. I’m producing that together Tobias Zimmergren. As the show's name suggests, it will be all about Microsoft Azure.

You can listen to the first episode here about Azure Key Vault. You can also subscribe via several services for our podcast.

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

We’ve scheduled fun and interesting calls with Tobias over Teams, 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 openly discuss ideas, challenges with Azure, and how we work and approach technical problems.

During one of these calls, I think Tobias suggested that perhaps we should record these calls, as much of what we discussed seemed valuable and insightful.

We then spent a couple of months discussing, planning, and envisioning how our podcast should 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 mention during a hallway discussion at a conference. I was fond of Never Reboot, but after thinking about it for a week, it felt like it was from a TV series.

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

We’ll publish new episodes to every reasonable and possible service, such as Spotify, and Player.fm. Some services take some time to surface our podcast, so if it’s not on 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!