Duncan Davidson
Friday, July 17, 2020
The former Edeka grocery store near my home in Berlin

🏗 One of our regular grocery stories in the neighborhood is now a pile of rubble. Besides being a fairly ugly East German relic, it was what the city planners call a “flat man,” a single story single use building that doesn’t efficiently use urban space. In a couple of years, it’ll be a 6-story residential building with a new grocery store at the bottom.

đŸ’¶ Two of the German startups in the Microsoft for Startups program just had some major fundraises: LeanIX raised a $80 million Series D and Userlane raised a €10 million Series B. It’s really cool to see companies that we’ve helped continue to grow, despite all the uncertainty in the world.

đŸ“· As part of the massive acceleration to online learning, the Nikon School UK is closing down in London. Going online, they’re able to expand their reach worldwide. Sure, it’s nice to learn in person, but I really love that this trend is opening up access overall.

⛈ I really like the idea of Terraform, but each time I look deeply into it for managing Azure resources, I get tripped up over lags in the feature set. For example, the Terraform azure_cdn_endpoint configuration directive doesn’t support custom domains yet even though custom domains have been supported by the Microsoft Azure CDN for a while. That was the end of today’s attempt, at least.