In June 2026, I stumbled upon an announcement that Hosted Agents functionality of Microsoft Foundry went live, and promised the ability to properly code the agents that are deployed on the Foundry instances.

As I already had some experience in the past with hosting different agents, I took that news with great joy. As an engineer, I am definitely more fond of writing code that solves the problem, instead of relying on the prompts alone (even if I mostly work starting from prompt-engineering nowadays).

In June I gave a Polish webinar for AI Now Polska #2 - Utilizing AI Tooling as Azure Cloud DevOps, or, on the slide deck, from autocomplete to AI-native engineering. Same SysOps Polska orbit as the January SysOps meetup write-up (after all, it’s organized by the same team), but different audience: less Terraform-on-Foundry, more “how do I actually use this Monday morning when pipelines fail and three repos need the same fix.”

My Warsaw IT Days 2026 VoD premiered on 19 March - a recorded talk about Microsoft Entra External Identities, Polish title something like “scalable cloud auth without rolling your own AuthN/AuthZ stack.” This English write-up comes a few weeks after the event. YouTube recording · demo repo.

I picked the topic partly because of the calendar. Azure AD B2C is not vanishing overnight - Microsoft still supports existing tenants until at least May 2030 - but the product line has been in wind-down for a while. New customers could not buy B2C after May 2025. B2C Premium P2 went away on 15 March 2026, just days before the talk premiered. No new features land on B2C anymore; External ID gets those instead. If you are starting a B2B portal in 2026, that is worth knowing before you copy an old B2C sample repo.

Thursday, 12 March - AzureDay Poland 2026 at Airport Hotel Okęcie in Warsaw. My second time at the event, same venue as last year. Small coincidence: I had already slept in that hotel as a regular guest on the way back from Ignite in San Francisco a few months earlier. Conference day turns the lobby into badges, queues, and sponsor stands; a Tuesday night layover is just a quiet corridor and room service. Same building, completely different atmosphere.

On 14 January I spoke at SysOps/DevOps Wrocław MeetUp #25 - Chat, files, and Terraform: behind the scenes of building an AI solution in Azure. Polish talk, no public repo to clone - this post is the English write-up. Recording on YouTube.

The project was a file-aware chat: upload internal documents, ask questions, get answers grounded in those files. We built it twice - first as classic RAG on Azure OpenAI plus Azure AI Search, then as an Azure AI Foundry Agent. The second path was better for file handling; the first path was easier to reason about in Terraform. Platform engineers will recognize the pattern: the product story moves faster than the IaC provider story.

Microsoft Ignite 2025 ran 18–21 November in San Francisco - my employer’s delegation from Europe, and my first trip to the United States. I had been abroad plenty for work and holidays; Japan is still the place I would fly back to with no agenda. Westbound travel is always easier on jet lag for me; eastbound is worse. Landing in Japan was the rough part. San Francisco outbound was fine - the bad stretch was the flight home to Poland. Crossing the Atlantic was new either way.