Terraform

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. ...

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?” ...

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. ...