About
Hi, I’m Matt - an Azure Solutions Architect at Howden Insurance, based in the UK.
I hold the Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification (AZ-305) and I’ve spent the last decade or so working across software development, team leadership and cloud architecture.
What I Do
At Howden I work across development and cloud teams - helping to set standards, design solutions and make sure the things we build are safe and reliable to ship. A lot of my time is spent bridging that gap between how we build things, and how they are actually deployed and operated. Plus jumping in and writing some code or Bicep!
Recently that’s meant working on TiLT, an AI-first insurance quote and buy journey built following Microsoft first. I’ve been working on the Azure infrastructure, rearchitecting and developing the application, feature flagging, integrating Azure AI Foundry and CoPilot with Dynamics.
Day to day: Azure infrastructure, Bicep, Azure DevOps, .NET standards and development and helping teams build and ship with confidence.
Where I’ve come from
I spent nearly 9 years at NHS South, Central and West CSU (SCW CSU), and I mean from right at the beginning of my career - I started there at 18!
I joined as an apprentice studying a level 4 HNC. Then I worked through developer, senior developer, lead developer, senior application architect and finally solutions architect before I moved on.
That progression has really shaped the way in which I think. By the time I started working in architecture, I’d written the code, led the teams, owned the pipelines and sat in the design reviews. That background matters - it means I can understand problems from both sides.
During my time there I led teams delivering national-scale platforms, including a cloud-native real time vaccination reminder service for the NHS App, and a national shared data platform built on Azure with DataBricks. I was the SME for Azure DevOps and IaC across those programmes.
Why This Blog?
I write about things I’ve actually done, problems I’ve genuinely hit, and solutions that worked — or didn’t. If I spend a day figuring something out, I’d rather write it up than let someone else lose the same day to the same problem. That’s really what this is.
I believe in learning in public, and if something I write helps even one other person — that’s a win.
Find me here: