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Tom Meadon

Dad and CTO

The Subtle Art of Cloud Governance

Finding a balance between agility and control when managing a cloud environment is like walking a tightrope. Lean too far on one side and your teams find themselves hamstrung, unable to innovate; the other, and before you know it, your environment resembles the Wild West. One of the core value propositions of the cloud is self-service - it opens the door to huge innovation potential. Organisations that want to open that door should do so whilst protecting their positions on security, compliance, and cost management.

I wasn't sure about ChatGPT... until I was

When I say I wasn’t sure, I really wasn’t sure. It’s not that I didn’t think using ChatGPT would help me be more productive, or that I wouldn’t be able learn to steer it effectively. Rather, what I wasn’t sure about was whether regularly employing ChatGPT would erode some of the fundamental parts of my working day. My concerns were two-fold: I take pride in (and get joy from) writing code - simply put, it’s fun, and there’s always something new to learn.

Software Delivery Idealism

There is a lot of idealistic rhetoric in the software industry. That’s not exactly new, and for the most part we’re able to look past the often quite absolute language (the “musts” and the “bests”), and remember the importance of context. But that statement generally only holds when we talk about software engineering principles (tools, technologies, and design patterns). I feel we have a way to go when we talk about software delivery principles (people and processes).

About

I’m Tom. I am a proud husband, a new father, and a recently appointed CTO at a wonderful company called Sundown Solutions. I love music, good food and drink, and all things tech. Alongside those interests I’m also discovering a new-found enjoyment in writing - it helps that I’m married to a Cambridge graduate who patiently proof reads whatever drivel I put in front of her! I originally started this blog as a space for techie articles, but I’ve decided to forget this constraint.

Raising Chaos Part 2: Automating Chaos Experiments with GitHub Actions

In part 1 of this mini series I talked about some of the basics of Chaos Engineering and how Azure Chaos Studio can be used to perform experiments in a reliable, repeatable and safe manner. In this blog post I’ll be looking at how to automate the execution and observation of the experiment I created previously to enable us to add regular resiliency testing to our development lifecycle.

Raising Chaos Part 1: Creating and Running Experiments with Azure Chaos Studio

Wy wife and I live in a small, fairly calm town in the UK and we love it - the peace and quiet suits us perfectly. That being said, everyone needs a dose of chaos in their lives from time to time, so this weekend I decided to take a look at the preview release of Azure Chaos Studio to find out how I can use it to breach the peace of my Azure deployments 😇