Hi, I'm Chethan — a Cloud Architect writing about software, personal finance, telecom, and automobiles.

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• Building a Heavy-Duty Extension Box: 4 Wiring Tips

  By Chethan · Sep 04, 2026

  Commercial plastic extension boards are practically disposable. A couple of minor drops on a concrete floor, and the brittle internal plastic standoffs crack, leaving 220V live terminals floating loose inside a flimsy shell.

  

  The old board that started this project - a tiny screw-mounted plastic standoff holding the socket block had snapped off inside

  Electrical shops readily stock boards like the one that broke. A wooden one like this has to be made to order, but it fixes the durability problem outright. Real safety, though, comes down to mechanical details most basic diagrams overlook.

  Past wiring jobs I’ve pieced together from whatever YouTube tutorial came closest to the job at hand. This time I worked through it with AI instead, which gave instructions specific to this box’s layout and a quick check of the wiring before anything went live.

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• The AI Repatriation Cycle

  By Chethan · Aug 28, 2026

  Thomson Reuters just launched Thomson, its first proprietary large language model. Not a fine-tuned wrapper around GPT-5.5 or Claude. It’s a model the company owns outright, trained on its own compute, and it’s already live inside Tabular Analysis in CoCounsel Legal, reviewing up to 10,000 documents against up to 100 questions at once, with every answer traceable back to its source. It’s exactly the kind of high-volume, judgment-heavy review where a purpose-built model’s edge is measurable, not just claimed, and Thomson Reuters has said this is only the first rollout, with more of the product line expected to run on Thomson over time.

  That’s the headline. The interesting part is why, and it’s a pattern enterprise infrastructure has run through before.

  

  The same three-stage curve cloud adoption went through, playing out again for AI

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• Money Has No Memory: Pruning My Portfolio

  By Chethan · Aug 14, 2026

  I started direct stock investing in 2013. Like every investor, I tried sticking to the basics: buy quality, diversify sensibly, let compounding do the work. My philosophy has been buying stocks of companies making products I use or buy. Occasionally, I also bought them based on what I read or the company’s leadership. I also attempted to spread risk by buying two companies of sectors I had invested in, e.g., two bank stocks instead of one! But just like most portfolios after a few years, mine was no longer a lean, well-oiled engine. A pile of accidental bets had taken over: satellite positions bought on a whim, cyclical laggards I wanted to be rid of, cash scattered across redundant instruments, and demergers I never asked for, like Tata Motors splitting into TMPV and TMCV, or ITC spinning off ITC Hotels, that left me holding miniscule slices of businesses I hadn’t actually chosen to own.

  I started the exercise of pruning my own holdings recently, consolidating everything into a focused, high-conviction core. The hard part wasn’t the analysis. The numbers are easy enough to run. What’s hard is dismantling the behavioral traps that kept me holding on to positions that I might think twice before buying today.

  Here are the ideas that got me through it.

  

  Same capital, fewer, larger bets

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• Bootstrap Key Vault Secrets via ARM, Not the Firewall

  By Chethan · Aug 12, 2026

  A few years ago I worked on a setup where Key Vault sat behind a private endpoint, and the CI/CD agent needed to read and write a couple of secrets on it. The standard fix, the one documentation suggests and seemed obvious was to add the agent’s IP to the vault’s firewall exception list, do your thing, and tear it back down.

  It didn’t work reliably. The allowlist update didn’t propagate immediately, so we ended up with a retry loop polling the vault for a specified number of times before it would let the agent in, and even that failed often enough to be a running joke on the team. Every failure meant a manual retrigger and someone context-switching to babysit a pipeline.

  Rebuilding a similar setup recently, I went looking for a way to avoid that whole failure class instead of engineering around it, and it turns out Azure already gives you one. It’s just not framed anywhere as the fix for this.

  

  Two APIs guard the same secrets, but only one of them checks the firewall

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• Migrating My Old Blog Posts With AI

  By Chethan · Jul 24, 2026

  My About page has quietly pointed to an old Blogger subdomain since I moved here, propping up my real post count. This week I finally brought all of it home.

  Years ago, I had moved a handful of posts from WordPress to Blogger when I merged my two blogs, and even that had taken quite some time. Typically, the process is manual, involving copy-paste, post-after-post, loading images, formatting text etc. While export - import options exist, they aren’t infallible, and given that I currently use markdown files it wasn’t an option for me. With the availability of AI, I decided to give it a try. When asked for advice, I was suggested to provide the exported ZIP and it would take care of the rest. It sounded simple, but as it started to work on the migration, I realized that it was going through setting up widgets, some of them that I had used to source content (Zemanta, does anyone remember?!), RSS feeds and what not. I quickly instructed to ignore all that and focus just on the posts and images.

  

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