Recently I came across another engineer’s personal blog — clean layout, good typography, that “I actually finish my side projects” energy — and it pushed me to finally build one of my own. I picked Hugo because I like Go, and because using Jekyll in 2025 feels like opting into pain. I briefly considered Ghost, remembered it either requires paying Ghost or hosting Ghost, and closed the tab. And since I’m “the AWS guy,” it felt morally necessary to deploy the whole thing on AWS. Maybe I’d even use Kiro if I felt extra fancy. ...

When I talk to students — especially STEM students — one question keeps coming up: “Is AI going to take my job?” They ask it jokingly, but you can tell they’re serious. What they want is assurance. They want to know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. That the late nights, the debt, the effort, and the hope they’ve poured into their degree will amount to something real. ...

I was invited to speak at UNC Charlotte recently to the computer science programs, and I approached the session, Cracking the Cloud, with a very specific goal: to give students a realistic, actionable way to stand out in a job market that’s becoming more competitive every year. Companies are slowing early-career hiring. AI is reshaping workflows. Expectations for junior talent are rising, not shrinking. Students can sense this shift, but many don’t know what to do with that reality. That’s where the conversation begins. ...

I recently stepped into the role of host for Ippon’s Data Pour series, but before I officially took over, our CTO, Andy Lamora, sat me down at Wooden Robot Brewery in Charlotte and interviewed me on camera. It was a great atmosphere — good beer, good weather — and then a handful of cameras appeared, all pointed directly at me. I’m still getting used to public speaking, so the entire setup felt a little awkward. Beer helps, but only so much. ...

On the morning of October 20, AWS us-east-1 services were degraded—in particular, DNS services for DynamoDB. Most of us didn’t find out from monitoring alerts or dashboards. We found out because the apps on our phones stopped working. That’s the reality of modern infrastructure incidents: they often surface as user-facing failures long before the official root cause analysis lands in your inbox. I wrote about this outage for Ippon Technologies, focusing on three critical aspects that go beyond just understanding what broke: ...