// Career

Chris is joined by Matt Bradley, who helped establish the Public Cloud division at UKFast, to discuss four years of hands-on Azure experience. From migration and consultancy through DevOps automation, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud management with Azure Arc, Matt shares practical lessons, infrastructure as code trade-offs, compliance benefits, and why you must always design for failure in cloud workloads.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a production SaaS platform in your own time? In this Tales from the Real World episode, Chris is joined by Jamie Maguire — Developer, Microsoft MVP (AI), and Pluralsight Author — who shares the full story behind Social Opinion, a Twitter analytics and productivity platform built with .NET and Azure. Jamie walks through the evolution from a custom Bayesian text analytics API (built during his master's degree) to a full SaaS powered by Azure Cognitive Services, covering social listening, sentiment analysis, content scheduling, and audience insights. He also shares practical advice for anyone looking to build their own product: pick something you're genuinely passionate about, validate demand before writing code, and ship early.

Mental health affects us all, yet stigma and misunderstanding remain barriers to open conversation. In this candid livestream recorded during Mental Health Awareness Week, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan (Microsoft FastTrack for Azure) and Will Owen (formerly Microsoft, now Maersk) to share their personal mental health journeys — covering depression, anxiety, COVID-19 isolation, CBT therapy, medication, and the pressures of high-performance tech careers.

Chris is joined by Dominic, a Senior PM Manager in Microsoft Teams Engineering, who spent nearly two years building Sudoku Social as a passion project — the world's first cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android. Dominic walks through his decision to use Unity for its build-once deploy-to-many capability, and Azure PlayFab as the game backend-as-a-service powering leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and player statistics. The conversation covers how PlayFab's APIs dramatically reduced backend development effort, how Azure DevOps supported the CI/CD pipeline for the game, and the iterative learning journey of a first-time game developer teaching himself Unity, iOS, and Android development simultaneously.

Microsoft Learn is a gamified education hub on docs.microsoft.com covering Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, and more through modules, learning paths, and the LearnTV video platform. Browse the catalogue by role, level, or product, earn XP to level up, and use renewal assessments to recertify without retaking full exams.

Chris marks two months of weekly vlogging with a big career update: leaving FastTrack for Azure to become a Cloud Solution Architect in Microsoft's UK Customer Success Unit, focusing on the Manufacturing & Resources industry. The cloudwithchris.com site is also refreshed with a PodScribe-powered interactive transcript player that highlights spoken words in real time and enables crowd-sourced corrections — a meaningful accessibility improvement. Azure news is substantial this week, headlined by Azure RBAC for Key Vault data plane reaching GA (enabling secret- and certificate-level access control) and Azure Front Door Standard & Premium entering preview with private origin support via Private Link.

In this candid conversation, Chris Reddington is joined by Andrew Nathan — a former Australian Special Forces soldier turned tech professional — to talk openly about mental health. Drawing on personal experiences with grief, COVID-19 lockdown isolation, and identity loss, both guests discuss the importance of speaking up, seeking help, and understanding that it is okay not to be okay. A vital listen for anyone in tech or beyond.

Hackathons are a powerful accelerator for learning, innovation, and community building — but what does it actually take to participate in, organize, or mentor at one? In this episode, Chris is joined by Maria Vrabie, an experienced hackathon participant, organizer, and mentor with a background at Microsoft. They explore the full spectrum of hackathon formats: from university weekend events and charity hack days to corporate open hacks run with enterprise customers. Maria shares candid stories from both sides of the organizer table, practical advice for first-timers, and why hackathons are just as relevant for seasoned engineers as they are for students looking to break into tech.