The name comes from a demo that didn’t work, attached to a cadence that didn’t stick.
I was trying to demo a multi-cloud setup for colleagues at Guidewire highlighting the chicken and egg problem with it comes to creating control planes. It was a Lunch & Learn: “Turtles All the Way Down” It was meant to be the first one — the start of an actual content cadence, not a one-off.
Link this
Point “demo a multi-cloud setup” above at the dalorion.io write-up once it’s up.
Despite the Lunch and Learn generating a lively discussion. The demo didn’t fully land. I thought that since I worked daily in multi-cloud that I could multi-cloud from scratch. Worse, the cadence didn’t either — one talk, and then silence, same as every other time I’ve tried to start something recurring.
While I was prepping that talk, though, I went down a genuinely delightful rabbit hole trying to name the site that would host all the content this cadence was supposed to produce. Dozens of names later — cloud-native wordplay, playful dalorion.* variants, increasingly space-themed options — “Clouds of Orion” is the one that that stood out, a name that has stuck with me since. (There’s also a full esoteric myth I had ChatGPT generate for the name - Tech Priests, Dune, Evangelion energy.)
So: a demo that didn’t come together, in service of a cadence that didn’t happen, named during a tangent about naming. That’s the whole origin story. Not a triumphant one, but it stuck.
Fast-forward to now, and I’m revisiting the concept — not as a failed demo or a failed cadence, but as a place to think out loud in public. Lower stakes than a blog. No pressure to perform a cadence — just maintain a streak.
See the start here note for what this place is.