Now

User conference at /\$DAYJOB/

Demos, slides, and the particular dread of running live software in front of the people who pay for it.

AI features people will actually use

The bar is a feature that takes over work someone is doing by hand today. Not a badge on the marketing site announcing that we have AI too.

Azure, still

Modernizing the stack customer workloads run on. This one has never had a finish line and probably never will.

What the team needs to become

More people is the easy answer. The harder one is which skills actually matter in 2027, and which ones I would be hiring for out of muscle memory.

Budget season

ARR, P&L, headcount math. The business turns out to be a distributed system too, with worse observability and a feedback loop measured in quarters.

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company

Eva Dou. Equal parts corporate history and geopolitics, which turns out to be the only honest way to tell it.