Earlier this year I joined the Azure Synapse Influencer Program. But I don’t receive payments as an influencer instead I get a wide range of benefits, such as early access to new features and capabilities, access to exclusive training and resources, and opportunities to engage with the Azure Synapse product team and also the occasional free swag like a coffee cup and sticker. I joined the program to build my knowledge around the platform and be able to show its value of it to my clients.

Richard Presenting LMAO Helps During Outages In 2022, I had a fantastic year of reconnecting with my passions, meeting new individuals, delivering presentations, and gaining knowledge from experienced professionals. To conclude my travels and speaking engagements for the year, I had the privilege of journeying to Florida and delivering a talk at DevOps Days Tampa. Having attended DevOps conferences for many years, I was thrilled to create an engaging presentation that encouraged collaboration and prompted attendees to reflect on critical considerations when preparing for on-call duties.

A few days ago the opportunity to joined a Blacks United In Leading Tech speakers panel event to discuss “The truth about Black Consultants”. This was my first event with this group, it was a great conversation we talked about our personal journeys in the industry of consulting while sharing valuable insights and advice around some key areas of interest: Transferable skills for various positions in consulting. How to set the right expectations and key behaviors.

I had the opportunity to attend another DevOps Days Chicago which is a regional conference focused on software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them called DevOps. This was the fourth DevOps days I have attended, third in person, and first as a speaker. Speaking of which it’s good to be able to get back to a conference in person. I’m an extrovert so I love meeting new people and don’t get that really from virtual conferences.

Recently I took some time to revisit Azure Cache for Redis I got first introduced to the service in 2018 and a lot has changed since then. I won’t go into detail about Redis and what it is or What is caching. But instead, I want to share my thoughts on using it on the Azure platform. A particular use benefit of using Azure Cache for Redis instead of the self-hosting version for data cache needs is it will allow a business to bring the frequently called data to the cloud so that the data can be called faster with higher availability.

Recap This is a continuation of my 2020 network overhaul. You can read the details about how this project started at this link. I ended the updates to my home network in 2020 in a good place and by that I mean everything was running smoothly with the full network being managed by software. There were no issues but lot’s of opportunities for improvement. So that left me thinking my 2021 improvements would be focused on reducing dependencies on 3rd party cloud services such as Ring and Google Nest cameras.