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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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What I am currently reading (23rd Feb)
Feb 19, 2026 | 3 minute read
Currently reading ( 23rd Feb) These are the current online posts that I enjoyed reading and made me think. CODING A tool that provides observability across your Claude Code sessions - when running multi agent swarms this provides some nice info on what they are all up to - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-02-23 17:47:05 ) Brooks proved in 1975 that adding more programmers to a late project makes it later because communication overhead grows faster than output.
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Using aws-vault to manage access to your AWS resources from Kiro CLI
Feb 19, 2026 | 8 minute read
As we say at AWS, security is our top priority. This is why I have been spending time thinking about how to manage what our agentic AI tools can do. After publishing a previous post on this topic (Getting Kiro CLI to use short lived AWS credentials), this post takes a look at another approach you can take. Vincent reminded me about an awesome open source tool called aws-vault that helps developers move to using short lived, temporary credentials.
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Getting Kiro CLI to use short lived AWS credentials
Feb 19, 2026 | 10 minute read
Agentic AI tools like Kiro IDE and Kiro CLI are pretty awesome. You provide the right context, the right prompt, and away they will go. After a period of time, you can now review the output. Early on developers understood the power, but also the potential harm that could be cause (and we began to read stories like this one. Most developer tools now provide capabilities that allow you as a developer to have fine grain control of what they can and more importantly, should never do.
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What I am currently reading (17th Feb)
Feb 17, 2026 | 3 minute read
What I am currently reading ( 17th Feb) These are the current online posts that I enjoyed reading and made me think. AI A new CNCF inspired look at the agentic AI space - link [tool] - ( Added: 2026-02-22 23:48:00 ) A detailed 100 page guide from Jeremy Daley on how to build production grade multi tenant systems - link [best-practice] - ( Added: 2026-02-22 21:03:48 )
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AWS open source newsletter #218
Jan 28, 2026 | 30 minute read
Edition #218 - January 2026 Welcome to issue #218 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where I try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. Many of you will be on your way to FOSDEM, and sadly I will not be there this year - although I will be in spirit as my weekend will be spent watching the livestreams. In this months edition we have a nice selection of projects - from tools to help you review and audit your cloud resources, to projects that simplify deployment of complete AI stacks, and cool terminal based tools that will delight a lot of you I am sure.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- AWS CDK
- AWS Amplify
- Valkey
- Strands Agents
- FreeBSD
- vault
- Istio
- Kiali
- Kubernetes
- AWS Lambda Powertools
- DuckDB
- Spring
- Langraph
- MLflow
- AWS IoT Greengrass
- GitLab
- ArgoCD
- kro
- Apache Airflow
- Apache Iceberg
- dbt
- OpenSearch
- PostgreSQL
- Apache Kafka
- Mountpoint for Amazon S3
- Karpenter
- OpenShift
- Apache Spark
- Gradle
- RabbitMQ
- Amazon Corretto
- MySQL
- AWS Neuron SDK
- Ubuntu
- InfluxDB
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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.