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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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AWS open source newsletter #207
Feb 28, 2025 | 25 minute read
Edition #207 - February 2025 Welcome to issue #207 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 real time analysis of your client calls to AWS APIs, a dashboard for all your AWS Health Events, an EBS analysis tool, a SIEM tool that allows you to query your AWS events, a really cool AI Coding Assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock, a really great demo of how to implement an MCP server, running WhispherX on AWS Lambda, and more!
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- kro
- AWS CDK
- OpenTelemetry
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- dstack
- GraphRAG
- FFMpeg
- ArgoCD
- Terragrunt
- OpenTofu
- Django
- PostgreSQL
- Apache Kafka
- Amazon Linux
- Apache Flink
- Apache Airflow
- MWAA
- Apache Spark
- MySQL
- Qonto
- Prometheus
- Amazon EMR
- Apache Iceberg
- OpenSearch
- Valkey
- AWS Amplify
- Lustre
- InfluxDB
- Cedar
- Aider
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AWS open source newsletter #206
Jan 27, 2025 | 23 minute read
Edition #206 Happy New Year and welcome to issue #206 of the AWS open source newsletter, the newsletter where we try and provide you the best open source on AWS content. As this is the first edition post re:Invent, you will find a lot of content showcasing all the new open source stuff that AWS has released, so there is plenty of really cool stuff to get stuck into - whether you are cloud native and want to know more about Amazon EKS Auto Mode, or more a data guru that is super excited about Apache Iceberg support in Amazon S3 Tables.
- oss-newsletter
- aws open source
- AWS CDK
- Cedar
- Swift
- Apache Iceberg
- Valkey
- Kubernetes
- Amazon EKS
- Karpenter
- OpenShift
- ROSA
- Bottlerocket
- TensorFlow
- Triton
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- MariaDB
- InfluxDB
- Apache Kafka
- Amazon EMR
- Apache Spark
- dbt
- OpenZFS
- AWS Amplify
- Grafana
- OpenSearch
- Apache ActiveMQ
- Powertools for AWS Lambda
- Backstage
- Apache Flink
- Prometheus
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Using AI coding assistants to develop a spinning wheel web application
Jan 9, 2025 | 6 minute read
This post was inspired by my colleague Matheus, who has used the aws spinning wheel (see blog post here) to help make running re:Cap’s a little more interesting and fun. That is a really neat solution, but I didn’t want to use that project as it was a little more comprehensive than I needed. As it is the new year, and I am starting to get hands on with all the really cool new features in Amazon Q Developer announced at re:Invent 2024, I thought I would create a simpler version.
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Amazon Q Developer Tips: 25 tips to supercharge your development
Dec 25, 2024 | 4 minute read
Tip 25 - Tips to help you get the most out of Amazon Q Developer Over the past weeks I have shared daily tips on how you can get the best out of AI coding assistants like Amazon Q Developer. Over the festive period some of you may find yourself with some free time, or perhaps you are going to be setting yourself some new years resolutions. For those that are planning on building new projects, or perhaps wanting to learn something new, then I hope this set of tips and tricks will help you towards that goal.
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Amazon Q Developer Tips: No.24 Amazon Q Developer community resources
Dec 24, 2024 | 3 minute read
In this series I will be sharing daily hints and tips to help you get ahead and start to accelerate you on your own journey with Amazon Q Developer. Each day I will share a new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly. Check out the previous tips here.
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Amazon Q Developer Tips: No.23 Debugging with Amazon Q
Dec 23, 2024 | 6 minute read
In this series I will be sharing daily hints and tips to help you get ahead and start to accelerate you on your own journey with Amazon Q Developer. Each day I will share a new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly. Check out the previous tips here.
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Amazon Q Developer Tips: No.22 Amazon Q Keyboard shortcuts
Dec 23, 2024 | 4 minute read
In this series I will be sharing daily hints and tips to help you get ahead and start to accelerate you on your own journey with Amazon Q Developer. Each day I will share a new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly. Check out the previous tips here.