Why I'm Starting This Blog

I’ve spent the last 8 years building cloud platforms, pro/no code solutions, high performance teams and more recently AI agents and solutions for large enterprise businesses. During that time, I kept wishing a blog existed that could guide me through it all — what worked, what didn’t, how to build this, how to manage that.

That blog didn’t exist. So I thought I’d write it!

But what will I cover in my blogging?

• How to guides: I want to use this as a space to encourage to keep building and keep being hands on as I progress in my career. I will be posting build guides on anything I find interesting! From Copilot Studio to Microsoft Foundry. From building tools in Rust to running Nvidia blueprints in Azure. There will be a lot of variety but inevitably a large focus on AI.
• Full code repos and decision logs: Whilst I’m building I want to make sure all code, decisions, architectures are publicly available on GitHub. Maybe it will help you make a decision in the future! Really, it will help me as a sounding board when we’re building at Phoenix Software to make sure we get that right.
• Engineering management and leadership in the GenAI era: As a small but highly efficient team we have developed processes and tools to deliver results quickly. How do we use LLMs and MCP tools with GenAI for Sprint Planning? Solution Specifications? How are we measuring utilisation when agents are doing meaningful work alongside our developers? How do we develop our people from no-code to pro-code and beyond in such a rapidly changing landscape? I’m figuring this out as we go but already have some great blueprints you can use with your teams.
• Sovereign Cloud & AI: Working with the UK public sector we ensure in our day-to-day operations that everything we do is sovereign. This important governance step can be overlooked by rapidly deploying teams. We’ve approached this by building this first and integrating it into everything we do as step 1. I will share our approach to this including some in-house tools we built to support this.

Why now?

In the last 12 months alone Microsoft has renamed its AI platform twice. The UK government published its AI Opportunities Action Plan, an AI Playbook and set up a Sovereign AI Unit. Copilot Studio grew up and became a fully fledged autonomous agent building platform. At one point when we were building we noticed the UI elements changing as frequently as a 12 hour period. The landscape is moving quickly and there’s a gap for a practitioners voice to try and cut through the noise.

As well as this, since my move into more senior leadership positions within Phoenix I’ve become less technical and I want to write this blog as a commitment to keep me on track. Writing will force clarity. Building in public forces accountability. And the best way to learn something deeply is to try and explain it to someone else.

So to wrap this post up — if you’re building AI in the Microsoft ecosystem, leading a team through this great shift, or just trying to keep your data secure within the UK — this is for you!