I’ve gone and started a Substack! It was actually inspired by listening to this podcast interview with Emily Sundberg of FeedMe, whose Substack I instantly paid for – rare af for me. Please subscribe if you’d like my slightly more candid musings about tech and AI, mostly, behind a pretty minor paywall. ♡ Thanks!
Author: Virginia
Black Friday cloud nudge
I’ve been trying to migrate over some content from LinkedIn posts to my blog; this is an old one but still relevant as Black Friday looms. (Or “Black November,” as many UK retailers have taken to calling it!) Don’t let your workload get taken down by lack of preparation during this chaotic land grab for… Continue reading Black Friday cloud nudge
Major cloud outages
The whole time I’ve been a cloud and AI technical trainer, it has been funded somehow by a given hyperscale cloud provider. I always get interesting questions from my students about various multi-cloud scenarios, and I’m always interested in learning more and helping customers learn more – but the training content never accounts for the… Continue reading Major cloud outages
Remember when the Hollow Knight sequel crashed all of the game storefronts?
The new Hollow Knight game crashed the digital storefront of every major game portal it’s offered on! Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people trying to eagerly download it right on launch day. Exciting! Embarrassing? Sometimes disappointing? It can be all of these things! And also an opportunity to talk about scalable architecture and… Continue reading Remember when the Hollow Knight sequel crashed all of the game storefronts?
Experiments with pavement crack gardening
I’ve decided to give something odd a go. In the summer, a bright red common/Rhoeas poppy plant bloomed from a crack between a house and the pavement/sidewalk* a few doors down from our house. My daughter was OBSESSED with it, wanting to pick it/pluck its petals; my son liked tracking whether it was in bud,… Continue reading Experiments with pavement crack gardening
Black Friday cloud scaling
Friendly reminder to everyone who has important stuff deployed in the cloud – Black Friday/Cyber Monday is coming! Do you have any reservations in place that guarantee sufficient compute capability for your mission-critical IaaS apps? Do you have auto-scaling configured (both metrics-based and scheduled per historical traffic) enough to handle a potentially unexpected spike in… Continue reading Black Friday cloud scaling
Buying a designer knockoff rug on Etsy
I’m not real proud of this post title, but it’s honest. I was hot to trot about a beautiful rug I’d discovered by an amazing visual artist at a fancy rug store in Shoreditch, called Floor Story. I worked with them to figure out a bespoke palette, dimensions, and design (bigger than a runner, to… Continue reading Buying a designer knockoff rug on Etsy
My tiny London wildlife pond
I wrote this up in a Bryn Mawr alum group, but I wanted to share out here as well in case others are interested. I read a zillion online guides before creating mine, so I’ll try and link those out eventually! I decided I wanted a wildlife pond after seeing them on some social media… Continue reading My tiny London wildlife pond
Smartphones, social media, and parenting teens/tweens
I was recently part of a big parenting discussion group about whether a parent should allow her tween to have a smartphone with Snapchat. It produced a lot of stories and anecdotes and feelings and opinions, including a few tales of teens finding ways to circumventing parental controls or even picking up burner phones in… Continue reading Smartphones, social media, and parenting teens/tweens
Garden learnings so far
I threw together a blog post of all I was going to attempt to do to quickly get a pulled-together-looking garden, with minimal effort. Let’s revisit and see how things are shaping up now that spring has sprung! Things I’d do differently next time: Prioritising pollinators! I sort of assumed that most flowering plants were… Continue reading Garden learnings so far