I learned cloud by fixing it first.

My first cloud job, back in 2018, was on an Azure support desk. It is an underrated place to start. For three and a half years I triaged incidents, wrote root-cause reports and ran restore tests, and I learned that most outages are not clever. They are an alert nobody tuned, a permission nobody reviewed, or a change that went out with no way back.

That has shaped how I build ever since. After an MBA at the University of the West of Scotland, I joined Achel Group in the UK as a Cloud Engineer and worked on the AWS platform itself: landing zones, EKS clusters, pipelines and golden images. A year later I stepped into the Solutions Architect role, which meant more time with product and leadership teams, agreeing what should be built before anyone opened a Terraform file.

I am comfortable at a whiteboard and in a pull request, and I think the best architects need to be both. What I care about is the unglamorous work that makes a platform easy to live with: guardrails that catch mistakes early, releases you can undo in minutes, and a monthly bill the finance team can actually read.