Blog
Notes from the field: cloud, AI, leadership, and building startups.
AWS GuardDuty Threat Detection Tuning for Production
Reducing GuardDuty noise by 60% while maintaining detection of real threats through suppression rules, trusted IP lists, and finding prioritization
DevOps and SRE in the AI Era: From Manual Operators to AI Orchestrators
How AI is transforming DevOps and SRE roles from reactive operators to AI orchestration engineers, with salary data, skill shifts, and career strategies.
Kubernetes Network Policies for Zero-Trust: Blocking Lateral Movement in 200-Pod Clusters
How we implemented zero-trust networking in a 200-pod Kubernetes cluster using network policies, reducing our attack surface by 94% without breaking services.
Intelligent Tool Selection: How AI Agents Choose the Right Tool for Each Subtask
Build production tool-selection systems for AI agents with routing algorithms, confidence scoring, and fallback strategies for function calling.
Structured Data Extraction from Unstructured Documents with Claude
Building production data extraction pipelines that convert messy PDFs, emails, and scanned documents into structured data with 97.3% accuracy.
PostgreSQL Table Partitioning Strategies for Billion-Row Tables
Implementing range, list, and hash partitioning on RDS PostgreSQL for tables exceeding 1 billion rows — with query performance benchmarks and maintenance automation.
The Hidden Cost: AI Datacenters Consume 700K Gallons of Water Daily for Cooling
AI datacenters consume 700,000+ gallons of water daily for cooling. Analysis of water usage effectiveness, environmental impact, and sustainable alternatives.
Your Engineering Brand Is Your Best Recruiter. Here Is How to Build One.
How we built an engineering brand that generates 40% of qualified candidates organically, reducing cost-per-hire by 55% and time-to-fill by 3 weeks.
AI-Assisted Monolith-to-Microservices Decomposition with Kiro
How Kiro analyzes domain boundaries, data coupling, and change frequency to generate safe microservices extraction plans from monolithic codebases.
GPT-4o vs Claude Sonnet Agent Benchmarks: 500 Real-World Tasks Compared
Head-to-head benchmark of GPT-4o vs Claude Sonnet on 500 production agent tasks covering code gen, reasoning, tool use, and multi-step planning.
Will AI Shrink Engineering Teams? Evidence from 200 Startups Using AI Coding Tools
Survey data from 200 startups reveals how AI tools are actually affecting engineering team sizes, hiring plans, and organizational structure in 2026.
Testing AI Agents: Simulation Environments That Catch Failures Before Production
How to build simulation environments for AI agent testing including sandboxed tool execution, scenario generation, regression testing, and chaos engineering for agents.
Agentic AI Memory Persistence: Long-Term Architectures for Context Across Sessions
Design long-term memory systems for AI agents that maintain context across sessions using vector stores, knowledge graphs, and tiered retrieval.
We Measured AI Pair Programming for 6 Months Across 40 Engineers. Here Are the Real Numbers.
A controlled 6-month study of AI pair programming across 40 engineers, measuring actual productivity, code quality, and developer satisfaction with hard data.
Reducing AWS OpenSearch Costs by 65% with Tiered Storage
How we cut OpenSearch logging costs from $18K to $6.3K/month using UltraWarm, cold storage, index lifecycle policies, and query optimization.
When to Fine-Tune vs When to RAG: A Data-Driven Framework
A systematic decision framework for choosing between fine-tuning and RAG — based on data characteristics, latency requirements, cost constraints, and maintenance burden.
Mutual TLS Across 200 Microservices: Zero-Downtime Certificate Rotation at Scale
Implementing mTLS with automated certificate rotation across our Kubernetes service mesh, eliminating plaintext service-to-service communication
Building Event-Driven AI Automation with Kiro Hooks for CI/CD, Testing, and Docs
Kiro hooks enable event-driven AI automation for CI/CD, testing, and documentation, reducing manual overhead by 68% in engineering workflows.
OpenAI Assistants API Production Patterns: Persistent Threads, Tool Use, and Scaling
Master OpenAI Assistants API production patterns with persistent threads, function calling, and scalable architectures for enterprise AI agents.
Scaling Laws Meet Energy Constraints: When Bigger Models Are Not Worth the Power
Analysis of AI scaling laws vs energy constraints. Data showing diminishing returns of model size on performance per watt with Chinchilla-optimal tradeoffs.
AI-Generated Code vs Human Code: Quality Analysis Across 10,000 Production PRs
We analyzed 10,000 production pull requests comparing AI-generated and human-written code on bugs, security, maintainability, and performance metrics.
AI-Powered Customer Support: From 4-Hour Resolution to 12 Minutes with Claude
How we built a Claude-powered support system that reduced average ticket resolution time from 4 hours to 12 minutes while maintaining 96% customer satisfaction.
Managing Stakeholder Expectations in Engineering
How to communicate engineering timelines, handle scope creep, say no constructively, and maintain trust with stakeholders when reality doesn't match their expectations
Agentic AI and the EU AI Act: Compliance Requirements for Autonomous Systems
Technical compliance guide for the EU AI Act covering agentic AI classification, mandatory requirements, documentation obligations, and implementation strategies.
How Agentic AI Systems Decompose Complex Tasks into Executable Plans
Agentic AI planning and task decomposition strategies that achieve 91% execution success through structured goal-to-action transformation.
AWS MemoryDB for Redis: Durable Caching with Microsecond Reads
Replacing Redis + DynamoDB dual-write patterns with MemoryDB — achieving microsecond read latency with full durability and Multi-AZ replication.
Compliance-as-Code: Generating Policies from Regulatory Requirements with Kiro
How Kiro translates dense regulatory text into enforceable infrastructure policies, closing the gap between compliance teams and engineering.
5 Technical Decisions I Regret and What They Taught Me About Humility
An honest retrospective on five architectural and technology choices that seemed right at the time but created lasting pain, and the decision frameworks that emerged.
The 7 Skills That Make Engineers Irreplaceable in the AI Era — Backed by Hiring Data
Data from 500+ job postings and hiring managers reveals which engineering skills AI cannot replicate and command premium compensation in 2026.
Building an AI Document Classification and OCR Pipeline
End-to-end architecture for automated document processing combining OCR, layout analysis, and transformer-based classification for enterprise document workflows
