Ned In The Cloud

I've been building an AI PC for myself as part of the preparation for a series of courses on Pluralsight focusing on running Small Language Models. Local AI is an area that I've wanted to dig into for a while, and building a course for others is a great w

This post has basically nothing to do with technology. If you're looking for that stuff, check out the rest of (looks around) this whole site. I thought of this post while out trail running this weekend, and I didn't have anywhere else to put it. I'm not

There is a stubborn myth in tech that good software work is mostly about tools, velocity, and individual brilliance. If the metrics look good and features ship on time, everything else is secondary. People will adapt. Teams will sort themselves out. Cultu

Neditor's note: When I wrote this a few months ago, I really wasn't sure I was going to publish it. It felt too raw, too personal, and too self-pitying. I shared it with a friend, who gave me constructive feedback that boiled down to: Tech ate your life a

I wanted to give OpenClaw its own mailbox in Microsoft 365 so it could read mail, send messages, and generally act like a useful automation agent without piggybacking on my personal account. The trick was doing it in a way that was secure, auditable, and

There is no shortage of AI content right now. Unfortunately, a lot of it lives somewhere between breathless hype and thinly disguised marketing copy. Every vendor claims AI will transform software delivery, replace half your team, and solve all your opera

Your workloads are probably spread across multiple clouds. That's nothing new, but what I hadn't heard before is that 84% of organizations are using two or more cloud providers for critical services. That's not shocking, but I also didn't realize the numb

I don't think most practitioners spend a lot of time worrying about malware hidden inside an open source package. We worry about vulnerable code, sure. We worry about breaking changes, unplanned upgrades, and the occasional dependency rabbit hole. But mal

Platform engineering can be a slippery term because it means different things depending on where you sit. For some teams it means golden paths, paved roads, and internal platforms. For others it means the group that owns all the infrastructure glue no one

As I mentioned in my planning for 2026 post, I wanted to get the AI-900 and AI-102 certifications from Microsoft as part of a larger goal of learning more about AI Engineering and being able to deliver Microsoft Training in that area. Good news! Last week