Wellington Tech

In the previous posts, I wrote about speaking at Global Azure ANZ 2026 and the strange speed at which universities seem to be reversing themselves on AI. But the conversation that lingered longest in my head afterwards was about coding itself. Or maybe not coding exactly. More about the feeling of coding. One developer told me they just were not enjoying the new AI coding tools very much. The outputs were fine. Useful even. But something felt missing. The satisfaction had thinned out somehow. ...

In my previous post, What I Learnt Speaking at Global Azure ANZ 2026, I mentioned a short conversation that stayed with me long after the event ended. A university student told me that in 2023 they had been actively discouraged from using AI during study. Minutes later, another student casually described using AI throughout nearly everything they worked on. Those two conversations happened back-to-back. And honestly, they captured something important about the current moment better than most keynote presentations do. ...

I went to Global Azure ANZ 2026 expecting cloud talks and AI demos. The talks were good. But the most interesting part of the event happened in conversations between sessions. I had the opportunity to speak at the Wellington chapter of Global Azure ANZ 2026, hosted alongside the Wellington Data Management and Analytics Meetup. Like many community events in Wellington, the atmosphere was relaxed, practical, and refreshingly free of corporate theatre. What stood out most though was not a specific demo or benchmark. It was the feeling that the industry has quietly crossed another threshold. ...