Richmond AWS User Group: An Evening of AI-Powered Development The Richmond AWS User Group hosted another successful meetup on March 5th, featuring a fascinating presentation on Kiro, AWS’s cutting-edge agentic coding tool. The event brought together local cloud enthusiasts, developers, and students for an evening of learning, networking, and pizza. Kiro: Revolutionizing Software Development Dinesh Balaaji Prabakaran from Amazon Web Services delivered an impressive talk on Kiro, showcasing how this innovative tool is transforming the software development landscape. Kiro represents a significant advancement in AI-assisted development, helping developers bridge the gap between ideas and implementation through intelligent code generation, problem reasoning, and accelerated development workflows. ...

I had the privilege of speaking at the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University’s College of Engineering on March 3rd, presenting “Cracking the Cloud: How AWS Certifications Can Launch Your Career” to a group of engaged Computer Science seniors. The Presentation My talk focused on how early-career technologists can differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive field. Three themes anchored the session: strategic certifications — particularly AWS certifications as a way to validate cloud skills before you have the job title to back them up — self-directed projects that demonstrate practical problem-solving, and building genuine relationships in the industry. That last one always gets a laugh because I tell students it sometimes means getting away from the keyboard entirely and, as I like to say, “doing a little grass touching.” ...

Everyone wants to ship AI into production. Almost no one wants to own what happens when it goes wrong. I’ve been in enough rooms with financial services clients to know how this plays out. A team builds something impressive on Bedrock — a RAG-powered knowledge assistant, an internal compliance copilot, a customer-facing chatbot. The demo looks great. Then someone in Legal raises their hand. What happens if it leaks a customer’s SSN? What if it makes a recommendation that sounds like investment advice? What if a clever user tricks it into ignoring your system prompt? ...

What does your online presence say about you? For many students, searching their name online brings up little more than a LinkedIn profile and perhaps some social media accounts. This limited visibility can make it challenging to stand out professionally or showcase your actual skills and projects. A personal website offers a solution - providing a dedicated space where you can control your professional narrative and present your work on your own terms. ...

Introduction On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Group—one of the largest market makers on the New York Stock Exchange—lost $440 million in 45 minutes due to a software deployment failure. The incident nearly bankrupted the firm and sent shockwaves through financial markets. While the technical details are fascinating, the real lesson lies in what wasn’t there: an effective, centralized mechanism to stop runaway automation before catastrophic losses occurred. This post explores how modern streaming architectures using Apache Kafka and Apache Spark can implement the kind of real-time risk controls that regulations now require—and that Knight Capital desperately needed. We’ll connect the dots between a historic trading disaster, regulatory requirements, and a hands-on demo you can deploy yourself. ...

Managing AWS costs becomes increasingly complex as infrastructure grows. Organizations often struggle with cloud cost management, spending valuable engineering time manually analyzing Cost Explorer data, identifying optimization opportunities, and implementing changes. Even with dedicated cost management tools, the analysis and remediation process remains largely manual, requiring specialized expertise to interpret cost data and translate it into actionable steps. This post demonstrates how to build an automated agent that analyzes AWS costs and generates actionable recommendations to reduce cloud spend. By combining AWS Bedrock’s analytical capabilities with Cost Explorer data, the system identifies cost outliers and provides specific optimization steps that go beyond basic visualizations to deliver meaningful insights. ...

Code reviews are essential for maintaining code quality, but they can be time-consuming and often repetitive. Developers find themselves commenting on the same issues across multiple pull requests: missing tests, inconsistent naming, inadequate error handling, and numerous other routine concerns. This creates a bottleneck in the development process, as team members wait for their code to be reviewed while reviewers struggle to balance thorough reviews with their own development work. ...

“Where can I find our vacation policy?” “What’s the process for requesting new hardware?” “Can you explain our security guidelines?” These questions echo through company Slack channels daily, interrupting workflows and creating redundant work for team leads and HR staff. The same questions get asked repeatedly, and answers are buried in documentation that’s difficult to navigate. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a simple yet powerful Q&A bot for Slack that leverages your company’s documentation to provide accurate, contextual answers. The best part? It runs entirely on AWS managed services, minimizing operational overhead while delivering immediate value to your organization. ...

I wrote this article for Ippon on February 10, 2026. The enthusiasm around projects like OpenClaw—an open-source framework enabling autonomous task execution across messaging platforms, file systems, and enterprise APIs—reveals a critical blind spot in enterprise technology governance. For an entire week, I heard nothing but discussions of moltbots, OpenClaw, Clawd, and various implementations being created with these tools. But when I realized the permissions being exposed and how enterprises were approaching agent governance, I felt compelled to document this moment in AI history. ...