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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.
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If you want to contact me, please use the email address below.
Recent posts
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Building a digital badge system with the help of Kiro (and Amazon ECS Express Mode)
Jan 15, 2026 | 7 minute read
I have been working on a new digital badge demo application that you can use to generate and then issue digital certificates. You have probably seen these in your LinkedIn newsfeed - those digital badges saying that you have completed this or that activity or training course. I have been using Kiro to create this demo application, leveraging the Strands Agent framework to make adding generative AI a trivial exercise (seriously, if you have not tried it yet do yourself a favour and check it out).
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Implementing an agentic player coach workflow with Kiro CLI subagents
Jan 9, 2026 | 8 minute read
Edition #216 - November 2025 Over the Christmas period I spent some of my down time catching up on blog posts and open source projects that I had bookmarked to “read later”. I have been interested in learning about opinionated workflows that use agentic tools like Kiro CLI to generate better output. One of those projects looked at how you can improve the output from agentic tools through something called player/coach (I think it might be similar to the actor/critic method that I used back in the reinforcement learning days of Deep Racer).
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AWS open source newsletter #217
Dec 18, 2025 | 25 minute read
Edition #217 - December 2025 Welcome to the Christmas edition of the AWS open source newsletter, #217. I am publishing this before the end of the month as I begin to wind down and get ready for the holidays. We have plenty of gifts from the open source community to keep you busy over the festive period, and we have a bumper selection of projects. There are too many good ones to single out, so go check them out and let me know which ones you tried and liked.
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Automating made easy with Kiro CLI
Dec 10, 2025 | 16 minute read
What are you automating with generative AI ? I have spoken at many events this year sharing how I see developers using AI coding assistants like Kiro and Kiro CLI. The top use case was debugging code, and I wrote about that in Debugging and troubleshooting issues with AI coding assistants. In this post I am going to talk about another very common use case, automation. I will share a couple of things that I found trivial to automate with the help of Kiro, but also some unexpected things I learned along the way.
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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.