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Welcome to my blog, where I share my writings as well as my weekly newsletter where I cover all things AWS and open source related. The majority of this blog will be technical, hands on with the occasional leadership piece.
I am always looking for great open source projects to feature and dive deep into, so if you are workingon something you are really excited about, please get in touch and I would love to feature that work within the newsletter or as a dedicated blog post.
Get in touch
If you want to contact me, please use the email address below.
Recent posts
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Zero to shipped - a year in review
Dec 4, 2025 | 24 minute read
A year of Zero to Shipped I am at Build Stuff doing my live coding talk, Zero to Shipped in 30 minutes. I have done this “talk” many times this year, and as I look back to January when I did the same session at PyCon+Web in Berlin, what amazes me is how far AI Coding Assistants have come in such a short period of time. Back then I used Amazon Q Developer (pre agentic mode), and a lot has changed.
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AWS open source newsletter #216
Nov 28, 2025 | 35 minute read
Edition #216 - November 2025 Welcome to issue #216 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. re:Invent is just around the corner, and this months edition has a lot of great pre:Invent stuff, and I can’t wait to see what other open source stuff gets announced. Some readers may be heading to re:Invent (or maybe already there), so enjoy the week.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- Jupyter
- Greengrass
- Strands Agents
- OpenTelemetry
- Swift
- Smithy
- Kubernetes
- Karpenter
- Traefik
- Kong Ingress Controller
- Envoy
- PostgreSQL
- CDK
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Apache Kafka
- Valkey
- Cedar
- Open Policy Agent
- Rust
- Python
- ActiveMQ
- RabbitMQ
- AWS ParallelCluster
- TiDB
- Amazon EKS
- Amazon Corretto
- Apache Tomcat
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Amazon EMR
- Apache Spark
- Amazon Linux
- Mountpoint for Amazon S3
- Lustre
- Slurm
- Ngnix
- Stelvio
- Jupyter Deploy
- Apache Iceberg
- Mem0
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AWS open source newsletter #215
Oct 31, 2025 | 29 minute read
Edition #215 - October 2025 Welcome to issue #215 of the AWS open source newsletter, the only newsletter that I know of that brings you the best open source on AWS content. There is nothing spooky or scary in this months edition we have a nice selection of projects that cover a broad range of use cases - tools to help you with CloudFormation stacks, provide a GUI layer over your Amazon S3 buckets, terminal user interfaces to work with Amazon ECS and your AWS profiles, a couple of nice tools to simplify building agentic applications using Strands Agents, and more.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- Valkey
- Redis
- AWS CDK
- CDK Booster
- Fluent Bit
- Strands Agents SDK
- LangChain
- Streamlit
- Argo CD
- Slurm
- KubeArmor
- Red Hat OpenShift
- ROSA
- Apache Iceberg
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Apache Kafka
- InfluxDB
- OpenSearch
- LocalStack
- LibreOffice
- Apache Flink
- Amazon Corretto
- OpenJDK
- Apache Airflow
- Apache Arrow
- Apache DataFusion
- Parquet
- Apache Cassandra
- Amazon Keyspaces
- AWS SAM
- Finch
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- Amazon EKS Distro
- eksctl
- OpenTelemetry
- AWS ParallelCluster
- Amazon Linux
- Smithy
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AWS open source newsletter #214
Sep 29, 2025 | 27 minute read
Edition #214- September 2025 Welcome to issue #214 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. Sometimes less is more, and I am using that as an excuse as I was on holiday for the first two weeks of September (in lovely Cornwall for those wondering, hiking the SW Coastal Path), and so have less time that usual to put this together.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- Firecracker
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- Strands Agents
- FreeBSD
- aws-nuke
- CrewAI
- LangGraph
- Karpenter
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Kubecost
- MLflow
- Apache Flink
- Apache. Airflow
- MWAA
- Apache Iceberg
- Apache Spark
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Amazon EMR
- Apache YuniKorn
- AWS CDK
- Valkey
- InfluxDB
- Amazon Linux
- Amazon Corretto
- LocalStack
- OpenSearch
- RabbitMQ
- AWS Neuron SDK
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AWS open source newsletter #213
Aug 28, 2025 | 25 minute read
Edition #213- August 2025 Welcome to issue #213 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. As always, this edition has more great new projects to check out. In this edition, we have a nice selection of projects that help you migrate your CDK projects, a number of graphical and text interfaces for a number of backend systems and data, a look at the Valkey client for Swift, and the usual sampling of.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- DocumentDB
- OSCF
- Strands Agent
- Amazon EKS
- Kubernetes
- ArgoCD
- KEDA
- Spring AI
- Bref
- OpenTofu
- AWS CDK
- Karpenter
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- dbt
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Flink
- Grafana
- Amazon EMR
- HBase
- InfluxDB
- Powertools for AWS Lambda
- LangGraph
- Valkey
- Cedar
- Mountpoint for Amazon S3
- OpenZFS
- AWS Parallel Computing Service
- AWS Neuron
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AWS open source newsletter #212
Jul 31, 2025 | 27 minute read
Edition #212 - July 2025 Welcome to issue #212 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. This newsletter was started in January 2021, and since then over you have engaged in the projects and content I put together over 3 million times. Amazing, so thank you for those of you who are still following and still sending me messages of support.
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Manage context rot by exploring new experimental features in Amazon Q CLI
Jul 2, 2025 | 12 minute read
Like many folk who have been spending their time with AI Coding Assistants like Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q CLI, understanding how to manage context is one of the key things you need to develop intuition for to improve the outputs these tools give you. More recently I have started hearing about new terms such as "context rot", and others exploring the field of context engineering. Understanding how to manage your context will be key to your success.
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AWS open source newsletter #211
Jun 28, 2025 | 35 minute read
Edition #211 - June 2025 Welcome to issue #211 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. I was super humbled by AWS Hero Lee Gilmore earlier this month, who gave this newsletter a shoutout - thank you! (and make sure you check out his own newsletter, the Serverless Advocate Newsletter). Please please please take 1 minute to complete this short survey - feedback is a gift, and your gifts help keep this newsletter going in the right direction.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- Swift
- Amazon Q CLI
- Cedar
- GNOME
- Strands Agents
- Valkey
- CDK
- Pydantic
- Kyverno
- OPA Gatekeeper
- Karpenter
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- Apache Kafka
- Apache Iceberg
- Trino
- Apache Flink
- Amazon EMR
- Apache Spark
- HBase
- RocksDB
- OpenLineage
- dbt
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS Amplify
- Tanstack
- Amazon Linux 2023
- .NET Aspire
- OpenSearch
- AWS Tools for PowerShell
- Prometheus
- Mountpoint for Amazon S3
- OpenZFS
- Powertools for AWS Lambda
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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Vibe coding with Amazon Q CLI - creating some load testing code
Jun 24, 2025 | 8 minute read
I have a long history with testing, and specifically load testing. Many many years ago, I spent many a happy hour designing, building, running, and then assessing load tests for the applications I was working with. It was one of the first technical interviews I ever did and it was also how I found AWS, spinning up Centos load runners to simulate thousands of virtual test users. Ahh the good old days!
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AWS open source newsletter #210
May 30, 2025 | 30 minute read
Edition #210 - May 2025 Welcome to issue #210 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. As always, this edition has more great new projects to check out, which include: a couple of projects for those of you looking for tools that can help you with cost optimisation, a new security threat modelling tool that uses the power of generative AI, an experimental Python SDK that offers async support, a nice UI testing tool (that will warm your spirits), and of course the now obligatory collection of MCP projects - that said, don’t miss those as I think you are going to love these, including some that have been contributed by a member of the AWS Community.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- AWS Lambda Powertools
- MCP
- arctic
- Strands
- AWS CDK
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- Valkey
- KRO
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- Finch
- Spring
- Localstack
- Karpenter
- Apache Spark
- openCypher
- PostgreSQL
- MariaDB
- MySQL
- Apache Iceberg
- PyIceberg
- LangChain
- RabbitMQ
- AWS Amplify
- AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry
- Amazon Linux
- Prometheus
- Apache Kafka
- OpenSearch
- Slurm
- AWS Parallel Computing
- CrewAI
- Lustre
- AWS Neuron
- AWS Amplify