Hi 👋, I'm Ricky

Thanks for stopping by 🙂!! I am Ricky Gummadi and I am based out of Auckland, New Zealand. This blog is a space for me to document and share my thoughts & ideas.

As Scott Hanselman said “if you get asked a good question, you should post it to share rather than reply by email” and this is the medium for me to do just that.

During the day I work for Microsoft as a Cloud & AI architect, in the evenings I work on my own projects and private consulting. Please note that all opinions, insights, and content shared on this blog are my personal views and do not represent the official position or policies of Microsoft or any other organization I may be affiliated with.

👍🏻 Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn

Presentations & Talks

I regularly speak at user groups, webinars, and community events across New Zealand and online. Below is a selection of sessions I have presented.

Recorded Sessions

Microsoft Auckland Reactor Pop-Up | Developing To Azure Kubernetes Service with Draft

Microsoft Events & Webinars

From Legacy to Cloud-Native AI-Ready Applications — Strategies and tools for transitioning legacy apps, processes, and data to cloud-native and AI-ready technologies. Covers automated code upgrades, re-platforming to Azure, refactoring to cloud-native architectures, DevOps modernisation, zero-trust security, and accelerating modernisation with GitHub Copilot AI agents.
- AZBC: From Legacy to Cloud-Native AI-Ready Applications
- From Legacy to Cloud-Native AI-Ready Applications (On-Demand)

Community User Groups & Meetups

Auckland .NET User Group — Sessions on .NET modernisation, cloud-native patterns, and building with Azure
Auckland Azure User Group — Deep dives into Azure services, infrastructure as code, and real-world architecture patterns
Software & Developer Community Meetups — Talks covering containers, Kubernetes, serverless, DevOps practices, and developer tooling

AI & Cloud Sessions

Application modernisation with Azure and GitHub Copilot
Cloud-native pillars: DevOps, containers, serverless, APIs, and data integration
AI-assisted development and deployment on Azure
Building AI agents and voice-enabled applications with Azure AI services
Running LLMs on consumer hardware

How This Blog Was Built

Before AI coding assistants were a thing, I set out to build this blog the old-fashioned way — evaluating frameworks, weighing trade-offs, and making deliberate choices. Here is the short version (the full story is in my Hello World 👋 post).

Requirements were simple: easy to author (Markdown), easy to build, easy to maintain, and most features (search, tags, categories) should work out of the box. Hosting had to be free, handle reasonable traffic, and support CI/CD.

I evaluated: Orchard CMS, Hugo, Ghost, Jekyll + GitHub Pages, and Hexo. Hugo was impressive but geared more towards generic sites. Jekyll + GitHub Pages was strong but meant learning Ruby tooling. Hexo — a dedicated JavaScript-based static site generator — checked every box and came with 360+ community themes.

The stack I landed on:

Hexo — Generates the entire blog as a static site from Markdown files
Icarus theme — Clean, feature-rich, and community maintained
GitHub Pages — Free hosting with a 100 GB bandwidth soft limit
GitHub Actions — Builds and deploys the site automatically on every push
Bulma — CSS framework to enrich styling beyond plain Markdown

The result is a zero-cost, low-maintenance blog where I write in Markdown, push to GitHub, and the site is live within minutes. No databases, no servers, no ongoing costs.