Home
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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!
-
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
-
Running Model Context Protocol (MCP) Servers on containers using Finch
May 2, 2025 | 6 minute read
I was chatting with AWS Hero Matt Lewis on the topic of how to run MCP Servers via a container image, and realised that I had not actually tried this yet. So this post was inspired by that conversation, and I hope it helps anyone else who is looking to try it out. In a previous post I introduced how Amazon Q CLI now supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) (check out Configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Amazon Q CLI for more details).
-
Configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Amazon Q CLI
May 1, 2025 | 7 minute read
Amazon Q CLI is a next generation developer tool that brings IDE-style autocomplete and agentic capabilities to your terminal. I have spent a lot of time recently writing about this amazing tool, and so was super excited by the news today that with the v1.9.x release, Amazon Q CLI now supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tools use. What is Model Context Protocol (MCP)? if you have not heard about MCP (where have you been?
-
AWS open source newsletter #209
Apr 29, 2025 | 23 minute read
Edition #209 - April 2025 Welcome to issue #209 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where we try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. I am publishing this from the AWS Summit London, and it has been great to speak to so many of the AWS community about open source - it is very much alive and thriving, so thank you all! As always, in this edition we have more great new projects to check out, which include a bumper selection of the current hot topic that is Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- Ruby
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- Amazon EKS
- Kubernetes
- Bottlerocket
- Karpenter
- PostgreSQL
- Apache Iceberg
- Apache OFBiz
- Apache Flink
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- AWS Amplify
- Spring Boot
- LangChain
- Valkey
- LangGraph
- MLFlow
- AuthZen
- Amazon Corretto
- AWS CDK
- Apache Kafka
- memecachd
- AWS ParallelCluster
- Amazon Linux
- Swift
-
AWS open source newsletter #208
Mar 28, 2025 | 24 minute read
Edition #208 - March 2025 Welcome to issue #208 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where we try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. As always, we have more great new projects to check out, which include an experimental profiler for your serverless Java applications, a bunch of cool projects around Model Context Protocol (MCP), an interesting project around extracting insights from your observation data, projects to help you with your AWS storage services, an interesting project for those of you exploring chaos engineering, some nice generative AI projects that help you explore your code base, and to finish, the usual round up of demo projects which you should go check out.
-
From PHP to Python - porting a Reddit clone with the help of Amazon Q Developer
Mar 16, 2025 | 12 minute read
In this blog post I share how I was able to use Amazon Q Developer CLI to refactor code from one programming language to another Many years ago, I spend many happy years developing code in PHP. It was such an accessible and tactile language, with a great community momentum that continues to this day. One of the things I used to enjoy, was trying out many of the open source clones of well known websites that the PHP community would release.
-
Using Amazon Q Developer CLI to build applications from the command line
Mar 9, 2025 | 2 minute read
I have been writing a lot recently about AI Coding Assistants, and I have been mostly using Amazon Q Developer within VSCode. This week though, saw a very nice update to the Amazon Q Developer CLI, a separate download that provides you with Amazon Q within your command line. It is available for MacOS and various flavours of Linux (you can download it from here. I wanted to see how good the recent update is, so I decided to try and build a quick web application from the command line.