Six Months of Writing: 141 Posts, 13 Topics, and a Much Bigger Story

Six months by the numbers

The current archive tells the story pretty well.

Those numbers also need a little explanation. A post can naturally cross categories. A discussion of Defender for Endpoint, for example, can be equally relevant to Security, Endpoint Management, and Licensing. A Terraform article can be both Azure architecture and part of my ongoing learning journey.

The category counts therefore describe the subjects represented in the archive, rather than being numbers that should be totaled to calculate the 141 individual posts.

And that overlap may be one of the most important lessons from the last six months. Modern technology does not stay politely inside product boundaries.

Since the last recap: the blog found a wider voice

The August recap ended with a new chapter beginning at Sycomp and with the blog becoming more than a private technical archive. At that point I was already seeing some of my writing shared through the company, which gave the work an additional professional purpose.

The period since then has been different from the first four months. There has been less emphasis on simply documenting how to configure something and considerably more on understanding why technologies, architecture, licensing, governance, and operational decisions fit together.

Security expanded beyond individual controls

Security and identity remain one of the largest areas of the blog, now representing 17 archived posts. But the conversation has evolved considerably from the early security baseline work.

Recent articles have explored Microsoft Defender for Office 365 licensing, identity hardening, Defender for Cloud, Defender for Endpoint Plan 1 versus Plan 2, Secure Score, and the increasingly broad role of Microsoft Entra identity security.

That evolution culminated recently with my SC-300 renewal. The interesting part was not simply renewing another certification. Preparing for it reinforced how much the identity conversation has changed. Microsoft identity now intersects with authentication, governance, risk, applications, networking, monitoring, cloud access, and security operations.

Identity is no longer one piece of the security architecture. Increasingly, identity is the security architecture that connects everything else together.

Azure went from another topic to a major learning path

One of the clearest changes since the last recap has been Azure. Azure, Cloud & Infrastructure now contains 16 posts, making it one of the largest subjects on the site. Certifications & Learning has grown alongside it to 15 posts.

Earning Azure Fundamentals gave me the baseline vocabulary, but Terraform has forced me to understand the architecture at a much deeper level. I started by learning Infrastructure as Code and HCL. I quickly discovered that the Terraform syntax was not really the difficult part.

The harder questions were things like:

• What should this Azure architecture actually look like?
• Where should resources live?
• How should networks and subnets be structured?
• Which identities should have access?
• What dependencies exist between services?
• How should monitoring and security be handled?
• What happens when the environment needs to change six months from now?

That learning path produced posts on Terraform, Azure Arc, Azure Virtual Desktop, cloud capacity, hybrid and multicloud management, and most recently the Azure Well-Architected Framework.

I can read about a platform, earn the fundamentals certification, and understand the terminology. But trying to build it correctly exposes a completely different level of understanding. That is exactly what Terraform has done for Azure.

Licensing became one of the site's largest subjects

I probably would not have predicted six months ago that Licensing & Cost Optimization would become a 15-post category. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. Licensing touches almost everything else.

Recent posts looked at Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Enterprise licensing, Microsoft Defender entitlements, Microsoft Security Copilot economics, the 300-user Business licensing limit, Windows 10 ESU and LTSC scenarios, SharePoint storage, Microsoft 365 Archive, Frontline licensing, NCE renewals, and FinOps.

There is little value in designing an environment that a customer cannot license, operate, or justify financially. The more I work across Microsoft 365 and Azure, the harder it becomes to separate the technical discussion from the licensing conversation.

AI became a governance discussion

The Copilot & AI category now contains 9 posts, but the evolution of that subject has been more interesting than the count. Early AI writing looked at Copilot adoption and consumption models. More recent posts have moved toward data protection, AI readiness, Microsoft Agent 365, Copilot Credits, Security Copilot economics, and why human oversight still matters.

The AI conversation increasingly starts before AI.

If the answer to those questions is unclear, adding AI does not fix the underlying problem. It can expose it much faster. That is why so much of my AI writing continues to circle back to identity, security, data protection, governance, and asset management.

The Microsoft-only walls came down a little

For most of my career, my technology world was overwhelmingly Microsoft-centric.

During the last several months, I have written about adding a Mac and iPad to that environment, Apple TV, smart-home technology, my basement workspace, computing history, and the broader impact of the AI infrastructure boom on everyday technology pricing. The Home Office & Personal Tech section now contains 9 posts.

None of that represents abandoning the Microsoft ecosystem. Quite the opposite. Using other platforms has made me look more critically at the experience Microsoft provides and has broadened how I think about interoperability, user experience, management, and the devices people actually choose to use.

Sometimes expanding your perspective simply requires being willing to use something different.

And then there are the posts that have almost nothing to do with work

This may be my favorite change since the 120-day recap. The archive now includes 10 posts under Music, Vinyl & Life.

There are stories about vinyl collecting, record stores, home audio, Ohio State football, pets, Columbus, and an evening at Nationwide Arena with my stepson. Even the vinyl collection made its way back into the technical side of the blog when it became the subject of a Power Apps solution and, later, a deeper technical blueprint.

Originally, I wondered whether those subjects belonged on a site that had become so heavily associated with Microsoft consulting. Six months later, I think the answer is clearly yes.

Technology is what I do professionally, but curiosity is what connects most of these subjects. I can spend one evening working through Terraform dependencies and another comparing vinyl pressings or adjusting an audio system. The topics are different. The tendency to understand how things work is remarkably similar.

Certification became documentation of the journey

With 15 posts, Certifications & Learning has also become one of the largest sections of the archive. Those posts now cover everything from my earliest certifications and the road from Small Business Server through Microsoft 365, to Azure Fundamentals, MS-700, Microsoft 365 certification renewals, AI credentials, Purview, SC-300, and the Terraform learning path.

I have never viewed certification as the end of learning. If anything, the last six months have reinforced the opposite.

Those four things reinforce one another. The certification posts are not really posts about passing exams. They are markers along a much longer learning path.

What the entire six months have really been about

Looking across all 141 posts, several ideas keep appearing regardless of the technology involved.

141 posts later

When I published the 60-day recap, this site was already becoming a useful personal reference library. By the 120-day recap, it had also become part of my professional voice and my new chapter at Sycomp.

At six months, I think it has become something else again.

It is a timeline.

It captures technologies I was working with, things I was learning, shifts in the Microsoft ecosystem, consulting lessons worth remembering, career milestones, projects around the house, music I enjoy, places around Columbus, family moments, and occasionally mistakes that still have something useful to teach.

That mixture was not really planned. But it feels authentic.

Related reading

• Last 60 Days on the Blog: Security, Power Platform, Migrations, and Practical Modernization
• Two More Months on the Blog: Growth, Governance, Learning, and a New Chapter
• Terraform Is the Easy Part: Learning the Azure Architecture Behind the Code
• Renewing SC-300: Microsoft Identity Is Becoming a Much Bigger Security Conversation