Welcome
I am a technical communicator with a love of explaining technical concepts in documentation, blog posts, videos, books and more.
I currently work for Chronosphere and have a small technical writing agency.
I am a podcaster, video maker, writer of interactive fiction, and games. This website is a home for all my blog posts, podcasts, newsletters and creative projects.
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Sign up for my Chinchilla Squeaks newsletter for a mostly weekly roundup of technology, gaming, history, language and general geekery.
Create macOS virtual machines with VirtualBuddy
VirtualBuddy can virtualize macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon, with the goal of offering features that are useful to developers who need to test their apps on multiple versions of macOS, especially betas. The project is in early stages, but I found with minimal configuration it helps you get a virtual machine up and running quickly and efficiently.

Apache Pulsar with Patrick McFadin
I have Patrick McFadin back on the show to discuss using Apache Pulsar for distributed cloud-native streaming and how it fits into Data Staxâs plans and business goals.
Cristian Heilmann - Principal Program Manager Developer Tools at Microsoft
Ian and Chris speak with Cristian Heilmann, Principal Program Manager Developer Tools at Microsoft about his long career through developer relations/evangelism, teaching technical skills, and so much more! https://christianheilmann.com

All-in-one friendly observability with groundcover
On this episode I speak with Shahar Azulay of ground cover who claim an all-in one observability solution with minimal change to your existing application code. Â Too good to be true? I find out. But they do have a very cheerful interface at least ;)
macOS native code editing with CodeEdit
A code editor built by the community, for the community, written entirely and unapologetically for macOS. Features include syntax highlighting, code completion, project find and replace, snippets, terminal, task running, debugging, git integration, code review, extensions, and more. Sounds good to me! Letâs see how it compares to others in a competitive landscape.

SBOMs and software security with Scribe
In this episode I speak with Barak Brudo of Scribe Security about software bills of material and their impact on software supply chains.

Live play - Battle of the Bards by Dustin Winter
Cross-post from my Solo Adventurer channel and podcast.
Will my musical past help me win a battle of the bands⌠Against myself? I compose a song, and maybe even sing it⌠Live!
Capture screenshots as Photoshop files with ScreenToLayers
Capture screens as a Photoshop documents, with layers separated ready for complex editing. This is an application Iâve wanted to try for a while and see how flexible it is for future changes. TLDR: It doesnât seem to be maintained anymore, but still mostly works.
Live play - Battle of the Bards by Dustin Winter
Will my musical past help me win a battle of the bands⌠Against myself? I compose a song, and maybe even sing it⌠Live! This game by Dustin Winter was featured in the latest Level 1 anthology part of Free RPG day.
Code faster and deploy instantly with Veryfront
Veryfront is a tool that empowers developers and teams to quickly build and deploy web apps right in the browser. With integration options aplenty, is this a low code option youâve been waiting for? Itâs early stages for the product, but some interesting ideas and features, that with more development could be a useful collaborative development platform for UI-based projects.

Increasing Cloud-Native Sustainability With Observability
Learn about the unintended environmental impact and cost of the proliferation of cloud services, frameworks, and âthrow an other service at itâ development.

A bumper bonus buffet
Back again after a lot of events, bouncing around the globe. So in this episode I report back on Open Infra Summit, OSCAL, HashiConf, and Monitorama. I also look at links from the past few weeks that caught my eye.

Increasing cloud native sustainability with observability
What are the hidden impacts of all the infrastructure and dependencies that are used to run a cloud native application?

Open Source Monitoring and Metrics Landscape
Navigate what open source monitoring standards are available, where in the ecosystem they fit, and how interoperable they are with each other.
Simple cloud environments with Napptive
Napptive promises to make it easier to create cloud environments, deploy, and manage cloud-native apps without worrying about Kubernetes. Is it really that easy?