About

About Me

I’m very fortunate to be a Customer Engineer (aka presales engineer) with Google Cloud. A role I love, I get to learn about our technologies and help customers adopt and transform their IT operations. Along the way I have been amazed again and again by the value and amazing products, often little known, services that Google Cloud offers.

Hence the genesis for this website. This is a platform for sharing those little known gems. Whether that is how to make the most of Google’s generous free tier or leveraging services that can have a significant impact with little cost. Google Cloud delivers a tremendous amount of value to its customers, but sometimes it can be hard to find. I’ll be aiming to post an article a week sharing a ‘hidden gem’ with you.

Prior to working with Google, I’ve had a tech career spanning more than 20 years across other vendors, managed services providers and being a customer. It’s this last experience that I often find most valuable when speaking to my current customers. Having lived experience gives me great empathy and I really appreciate what it takes to keep ‘the lights on’. Simply deploying a solution is just clearing the first hurdle.

Google has many great values, but one that I particularly love is that feedback is a gift. Or as I’ve always said, you can only fix what you know needs it. So please feel free to send me feedback or ideas for improvement.

Do you think you’ve found a hidden gem on Google Cloud more people should know about? Reach out and let me know.

-Sam Currie (sam.currie@gmail.com)

About this Site

Beside my content goal (discussed above), my architecture goal for this site was for it to be very efficient and leverage Google Cloud services. To that end this site has been built and maintained with the following technologies:

  • Hugo - Static website generator. Keeps pages lean and makes it easy to provide consistent formatting across the site.
  • Anatole Theme - Thanks Alexandar for the great minimalist Hugo theme.
  • Google Cloud Repositories - Secure managed GIT repo service.
  • Google Cloud Build - Manages automated CI/CD pipeline that is triggered by a GIT push.
  • Google Firebase Hosting - Very simple and fast hosting for static content with the added benefit of builtin CDN.
  • Google Analytics - One of our original products and still one of the best, website analytics.