Enhancing Security: Adding AWS Cognito Authentication to Your Serverless App Our serverless survey application is a great example of a modern cloud native application. It’s fast, scalable, and cost-effective. But it’s missing one critical feature: user authentication. In this post, we’ll walk through how to add robust, secure authentication using AWS Cognito. Why Add Authentication? Right now, anyone can vote, and anyone can reset the entire survey. In a real-world application, we need to control access. Authentication allows us to: ...

At an AWS Road Show this fall, Darko Mesaros demoed a URL shortener he’d built in Rust called krtk.rs. Something about watching a clean, fast URL shortener just work stuck with me. I’ve built a few of these for demos since then, but I wanted to try something different this time: build one in Python with a retro 90s vibe, and let Kiro handle most of the heavy lifting. Kiro is one of AWS’s three frontier agents announced at re:Invent 2024—autonomous AI systems that maintain context and work independently for hours. While DevOps Agent handles incident response and Security Agent conducts penetration testing, Kiro is your AI developer that takes specifications and generates production-ready code. ...

On October 20, 2025, DNS resolution failed in AWS us-east-1, and with it, a lot of DynamoDB applications went down. Not because DynamoDB itself failed. The service was running. Data was there. Capacity was fine. But applications couldn’t reach it because DNS queries for dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com stopped resolving correctly. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when the infrastructure layer beneath your supposedly resilient database becomes unreachable—October 20 was the answer. And it wasn’t pretty. ...

For this episode of Data Pour, I sat down with Nimish Donde—Head of Cloud Platform and Security Engineering at Truist—at Amélie’s French bakery in Charlotte. It’s a place that’s been part of the city’s fabric since 2008, growing from a single 24-hour location in NoDa (that I used to frequent during college) to four locations across Charlotte. Like this bakery, Charlotte’s tech scene has grown and evolved—and Nimish has been part of that transformation for the past 16 years. ...

At re:Invent 2024, AWS CEO Matt Garman announced something that made me stop and actually pay attention during a keynote—which doesn’t happen often. He introduced frontier agents: AI systems that don’t just help you write code or answer questions. They work autonomously for hours or days, maintaining context, investigating problems, and making decisions without you holding their hand. Three agents got announced: Kiro - your AI developer AWS Security Agent - your AI security engineer AWS DevOps Agent - your AI operations engineer This isn’t another coding assistant that autocompletes your Lambda functions. This is AWS betting that AI agents can handle the kind of multi-hour incident investigations that currently wake up humans at 2 AM. ...

For this episode, I visited the PORTAL building at UNC Charlotte to sit down with Dr. Mohamed Shehab—a professor whose mobile development course keeps showing up in conversations with students as one of the most impactful experiences of their degree. I’ve heard it repeatedly from students I’ve hired: “Dr. Shehab’s course changed how I think about building software.” When you hear that kind of feedback consistently, you have to ask what he’s doing differently. ...

Back in November, I was preparing for the Cracking the Cloud presentation at UNC Charlotte. I needed a way to explain how the cloud fundamentally changed what’s possible on the internet—not through abstract concepts, but through something students could immediately relate to. That’s when I remembered Thomas Game Docs. If you’ve never heard of her: she’s a YouTuber who makes incredibly well-produced video essays about video games. And she sometimes runs surveys asking her audience things like “Who’s the LEAST popular Pokémon?” or “Who’s the LEAST popular Animal Crossing villager?” ...

For this episode of Data Pour, I sat down with Lucas Ward—one of my SWE managers and a senior technical manager at Ippon—to talk about what it actually looks like to lead people in a consulting practice while the industry is shifting under our feet. We filmed at the Charlotte Beer Garden, which feels like the most Charlotte setting possible: more taps than you can count, plus the steady soundtrack of loud cars and motorcycles rolling by. We both went with an OMB beer (Mecktoberfest) because… you kind of have to. ...

AWS re:Invent 2025 keynotes felt like AWS repeating the same move they pulled 15 years ago—democratizing something that used to be gated behind massive budgets and specialized teams. This time it’s AI. I published a full write-up on Ippon’s blog breaking down the core thread running through the keynote: scale as the prerequisite for “access,” abundance via custom silicon (Trainium), and the shift from “AI as a feature” to “AI as a production capability.” ...

We filmed this episode of Data Pour at People’s Market in Myers Park, Charlotte—grabbed drinks, hit record, and got into the kind of conversation that happens when two people who grew up in “big data” start comparing notes on where AI is actually headed. Funny thing is—this bottle shop closed down a week after we filmed. Perfect metaphor for tech, honestly: everything feels stable until it isn’t. Why James James Barney is one of my closest friends and mentors. I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s been the person I go to when I want an AI take that isn’t hype and isn’t fear—just reality. ...