Insight: When the Cloud Stumbles—Google Cloud's Recent Outage and What It Means for the Digital World

Mon Jun 16 2025

It was a Tuesday like any other for Sarah, a graphic designer in Dallas. She was putting the finishing touches on a crucial presentation, meticulously saving every few minutes to her Google Drive. Suddenly, the familiar spinning wheel appeared... and stayed. Frustration mounted as she tried to refresh, only to be met with an error message. Panic began to set in – the deadline was looming.  More

New Article on Medium: Why a $62B Company CEO Says We're All Becoming Supervisors

Mon Jun 16 2025

The AI conversation has become polarized between doom and utopia, but what's the reality from someone actually building these systems at enterprise scale? Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, offers a refreshingly grounded perspective that cuts through both the fear and the hype. His insight: AI agents are more like managing a team of capable but mistake-prone interns than the replacement scenario everyone's debating.  More

Insight: Beyond the Hype—What Agentic AI Really Means for the Future of Work

Sun Jun 15 2025

In a sea of bold claims and AI speculation, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi recently offered a refreshing counterpoint. Speaking with Business Insider, Ghodsi framed today’s AI landscape not as a revolution of autonomous machines but as a transformation in human productivity. His metaphor was striking: modern AI is like giving every employee a tireless team of interns. That imagery sidesteps sci-fi exaggeration and brings the conversation back to Earth.  More

Insight: Ubuntu Levels Up Security—Embracing sudo-rs for a Safer Future

Fri Jun 13 2025

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has made a significant announcement that's set to bolster the security foundations of millions of systems worldwide. Starting with Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka," the default sudo utility will be replaced with sudo-rs, a memory-safe reimplementation written in Rust. This move isn't just a technical curiosity; it represents a proactive step towards a more secure and resilient Linux ecosystem.  More

Build:  Develop Safer Wasm Apps with debugDispose in WebAssembly in Workers

Thu Jun 12 2025

By now, we’ve explored both FinalizationRegistry and JavaScript's emerging Explicit Resource Management (ERM) features as tools for handling memory in WebAssembly-powered serverless environments like Cloudflare Workers. But even with best practices in place, there remains one lingering question: How do you know your cleanup is actually working?  More

Solve: Explicit Resource Management and Safer Wasm Memory in Serverless JavaScript

Thu Jun 12 2025

WebAssembly offers serious performance benefits inside serverless environments like Cloudflare Workers—but it also opens the door to memory management pitfalls. Developers used to JavaScript's automatic garbage collection must adapt to manual allocation and deallocation patterns that WebAssembly modules demand. And while FinalizationRegistry gave us a partial safety net, it was never meant to be a full seatbelt.  More

New Article on Medium: My DragonOS SDR Journey

Thu Jun 12 2025

It started with a 2 AM YouTube video about tracking airplanes. Ninety minutes later, Mike Rodriguez was ordering an RTL-SDR dongle with two-day shipping and downloading DragonOS for his Raspberry Pi 5. What followed was a year-long deep dive into software-defined radio that transformed a casual Pi tinkerer into someone decoding International Space Station communications, capturing weather satellite imagery, and reverse-engineering industrial telemetry protocols.  More

Solve: How to Use FinalizationRegistry in Cloudflare Workers Without Missteps

Wed Jun 11 2025

In Cloudflare Workers, combining JavaScript with WebAssembly (Wasm) brings high-performance possibilities—but also complicates memory management. JavaScript employs automatic garbage collection, freeing developers from manual memory concerns. Wasm, however, uses a linear memory buffer that must be explicitly managed—allocating and deallocating memory manually to avoid leaks.  More

Solve: Defining Arrays of Structs in AWS Glue with CDK's aws_glue_alpha...A Cleaner Approach

Mon Jun 9 2025

AWS Glue is a powerful tool for defining data pipelines and transformations, and with the AWS CDK's experimental aws_glue_alpha module, developers can now define Glue tables directly in Python or TypeScript code. However, not all features are ergonomic yet—especially when working with nested types like arrays of structs. If you've ever tried to define a column as an array of structs with a well-formed schema, you may have run into a frustrating limitation.  More

New Article on Medium: An AWS Migration Competency Journey

Mon Jun 9 2025

I just published a companion piece to my recent AWS competency analysis - but this time, told through the eyes of Sarah Chen, a fictional consultant navigating the Migration Competency process.  More

Insight: Solving EventBridge Cross-Account Event Challenges in AWS Organizations

Sun Jun 8 2025

TL;DR: Cross-account EventBridge event delivery in AWS Organizations requires careful configuration of permissions, resource policies, and understanding of organizational trails vs. EventBridge capabilities. This deep dive explains common issues and provides practical solutions for enterprise multi-account architectures.  More

Insight: Aurora DSQL vs. Aurora PostgreSQL—A Quick Explainer on What’s Changed and Why It Matters

Sun Jun 8 2025

If you’ve spent years building on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, the arrival of Aurora DSQL might look like a natural progression. Same AWS branding, same PostgreSQL heritage—so how different could it be? As it turns out?  It's very different.  More

Insight: A Clear-Eyed Look at Aurora DSQL—What Amazon's New Database Engine Gives Us...and What It Leaves Behind

Sun Jun 8 2025

The call came in late on a Friday. A lead architect had just been told that her team would be migrating their backend to Amazon Aurora DSQL—effective immediately. No negotiation. No pilot phase. Just a quiet directive from above: "This is what our cloud partner recommends." She opened the documentation, scanned for jsonb support, and felt her stomach drop.  More

New Article on Medium: The Real Story Behind AWS Competencies

Sat Jun 7 2025

I just published a deep dive on Medium that's aimed at helping the AWS consulting community: "The Real Story Behind AWS Competencies." If you've ever wondered why experienced consultants with successful track records get rejected for AWS competencies, this article reveals the disconnect between what most people think AWS evaluates and what actually determines approval.  More

Solve: When Your Raspberry Pi Shows Up on the Router… but Vanishes from the Browser

Fri Jun 6 2025

You're staring at your router’s device list and there it is: your Pi-Star or MMDVM Raspberry Pi 3B+ proudly reporting an IP address. And yet, no matter what browser, laptop, or phone you try, the dashboard times out. No OLED display. No ping response. And definitely no web interface. What gives?  More

New Article on LinkedIn: Fibonacci's Eternal Sequence

Fri Jun 6 2025

What started as a medieval mathematician's idle curiosity about rabbit breeding patterns has become one of the most profound discoveries in mathematics. In 1202, Leonardo Fibonacci posed a simple question that would unlock a universal pattern governing everything from the spirals of galaxies to the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower.  More

Insight: DragonOS on Raspberry Pi 5—Part #1 What to Expect and How to Prepare

Thu Jun 5 2025

DragonOS is a specialized Linux distribution built on Ubuntu and tuned for software-defined radio (SDR), signal analysis, and cybersecurity. It comes preloaded with tools like GNU Radio, GQRX, SDR++, gr-inspector, and dozens more—all configured to work together seamlessly. It's the kind of distro that gives you a complete SDR toolbox right out of the gate.  More

Insight: Why DragonOS Runs Best on x86: Six Pain Points Raspberry Pi Users Need to Understand

Thu Jun 5 2025

DragonOS is a powerful Linux distribution that bundles together dozens of software-defined radio (SDR), signal processing, and cybersecurity tools. It’s a remarkable achievement—a true plug-and-play environment for radio tinkerers and field engineers. But here’s the rub: it was born on x86.  More

Solve: When Your DSI Screen Goes Dark After Boot—DragonOS, Raspberry Pi 5, and the Mystery of the Flashing Touch Display

Wed Jun 4 2025

You’ve wired up a Raspberry Pi 5 with a ribbon cable to one of those slick 7-inch touchscreens, ready to boot into a specialized distro like DragonOS. You see the Ubuntu logo during startup. Promising. Then... nothing. Just a slow fade through various colors on the display, as if the screen’s confused or stuck in a demo mode. Plug in HDMI afterward, and suddenly everything works again.  More

Insight: What AWS Really Wants for the DevOps Competency

Tue Jun 3 2025

To earn the DevOps Competency, a partner needs more than just technical skills—they need evidence of success, framed in AWS’s language, and customers who are willing to vouch for them.  More

Solve: AccessDenied When Calling PutObject—Solving S3 IAM Permission Errors in AWS

Sat May 31 2025

IAM permissions can fail silently even when everything seems correctly configured. You’ve granted the right permissions to a role, confirmed the bucket exists, the service is active — yet the call fails with AccessDenied and no further explanation. These types of failures aren’t just confusing — they’re demoralizing, especially when they grind deployments to a halt or block production workloads.  More

Solve: AccessDenied When Calling PutObject—Solving S3 IAM Permission Errors in AWS

Sat May 31 2025

IAM permissions can fail silently even when everything seems correctly configured. You’ve granted the right permissions to a role, confirmed the bucket exists, the service is active — yet the call fails with AccessDenied and no further explanation. These types of failures aren’t just confusing — they’re demoralizing, especially when they grind deployments to a halt or block production workloads.  More

Solve: AccessDeniedException or UnauthorizedOperation—Fixing IAM Errors in EC2 and Lambda

Sat May 31 2025

You launch an EC2 instance, call an AWS API from inside Lambda, or spin up automation with the CLI — and suddenly hit a wall: UnauthorizedOperation, AccessDeniedException, or a plain An error occurred (AccessDenied). It’s unclear which policy blocked the action or even which part of the system is to blame.  More

Solve:  ValidationException web_search Not Supported in Bedrock Claude Tool Calls

Sat May 31 2025

When developers try to invoke Claude's newer tools (like web_search_20250305) through Amazon Bedrock, the request fails with a ValidationException. This happens even when the JSON structure is correct and the model is compatible.  More

New Article on Medium:  Why AWS Still Runs on Reports

Thu May 29 2025

We’re often told that modern cloud systems are serverless, invisible, and infinitely scalable. But here’s the quiet truth: what actually matters—the thing real humans interact with—is the output.  More

Insight: The Lean Power of DietPi

Thu May 29 2025

DietPi is a lightweight Debian-based Linux distribution engineered for efficiency and speed, primarily on single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Unlike other general-purpose OSes, DietPi starts from a minimal base and allows users to build up only what they need. This is not just a slimmer Raspberry Pi OS; it's a fundamentally different approach to system design.  More

Insight: Ubuntu Core—Where Minimal Meets Mighty

Thu May 29 2025

When people hear "Ubuntu," they often picture a desktop environment or perhaps a server in the cloud. But tucked within the Ubuntu family is a lean, security-hardened cousin built not for workstations, but for devices. Ubuntu Core is a purpose-built OS for embedded systems—designed from the ground up to be stable, minimal, and nearly unbreakable.  More

Insight: The Great Minimal OS Showdown—DietPi vs Raspberry Pi OS Lite

Thu May 29 2025

When you're building a headless server, IoT device, or lightweight project box, the last thing you want is bloatware eating your precious resources. Enter the world of minimal operating systems—where every megabyte matters and efficiency reigns supreme.  More

Insight: A Document Is More Than Data—Rethinking Automation from the Ground Up with AWS

Wed May 28 2025

In today’s landscape, much is said about automation, generative AI, and orchestration frameworks. Tools are improving. Models are faster. Interfaces are more responsive. But beneath all that change, one truth remains: most systems are built to serve documents, not the other way around. Even in the powerful ecosystem of AWS, the focus should remain on the document and its purpose.  More

Insight: The Humble microSD Card—Raspberry Pi's OS Home

Sun May 25 2025

For anyone embarking on their Raspberry Pi journey, one of the first things you'll encounter is the instruction to "flash your OS to a microSD card." It's the de facto standard, the tried-and-true method for getting your tiny computer up and running. But like any custom, it comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Let's delve into why the microSD card reigns supreme for Raspberry Pi OS, and what its limitations are.  More

Insight: Get Organized with the sort Command in Ubuntu

Sun May 25 2025

Hey there, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts! So, you’ve got your tiny computer humming along, maybe you’re tinkering with some Python scripts, or perhaps you’re experimenting with configuration files. As you dive deeper, you'll inevitably run into situations where you need to compare two files.  More

Insight: Get Organized with the sort Command in Ubuntu

Sat May 24 2025

Hey there, new Ubuntu users! So you've just started your journey into the wonderful world of Linux, and things might feel a little different than what you're used to. Don't worry, we're here to help you navigate the command line, one powerful tool at a time. Today, we're going to talk about a super handy command called sort.  More

New Article on Medium: A Practical Guide to Cutting Redshift Storage Costs

Fri May 23 2025

Need to get large volumes of Redshift data off snapshots and into affordable S3 storage? We built a script...  More

Insight: From Snapshots to S3—A Smarter Way to Offload Redshift Data

Fri May 23 2025

Imagine you’re managing a mature Redshift deployment that’s been running for years. Some data is critical, some is rarely touched, but it all needs to stick around for compliance, audit, or regulatory reasons. The default solution? Snapshots. They’re easy, they’re automatic, and they live in S3.  More

Insight: Can You Save on Redshift Snapshot Costs?  Yes You Can...And Here's How

Fri May 23 2025

When running Redshift at scale, every penny counts—especially when it comes to long-term storage like manual snapshots. Naturally, folks start wondering: can we move those snapshots to cheaper S3 storage classes like Glacier? The question came up again recently, and it’s a smart one. The logic is simple: if snapshots live in S3, shouldn’t we be able to take advantage of S3’s storage tiers?  More

New Article on Medium: Simple BoardCheck for Raspberry Pi

Wed May 21 2025

If your Raspberry Pi is acting up, you don’t have to chase down command-line snippets anymore. Our new script, simple-boardcheck-pi.sh, runs a quick system health check and logs everything to a timestamped file.  More

Solve: Simple BoardCheck for Raspberry Pi—Fast, Clear Diagnostics in One Script

Wed May 21 2025

Some days, you don’t want to run ten commands and parse five logs just to figure out what’s wrong with your Raspberry Pi. You just want the basics—quick, readable, and honest. That’s what simple-boardcheck-pi.sh is built for.  More

Build: A Local Testing Walkthrough with Moto and EC2

Mon May 19 2025

When you’re building Python tools that work with AWS services, you don’t always want to reach into the cloud during development. It’s slow. It’s expensive. And it’s dangerous if your code’s not fully baked. That’s where Moto comes in — it mocks AWS APIs locally so you can simulate behavior and write repeatable, offline tests.  More

Insight: How MCP Connects Any LLM to Any Cloud

Sat May 17 2025

Modern systems aren’t neat and tidy. They span AWS, Azure, GCP, and even on-prem boxes hidden under someone’s desk. They involve multiple teams, multiple APIs, and increasingly, multiple AI models. And that’s where most integrations fall apart: every LLM expects different input, every cloud has its quirks, and no one wants to hand their infrastructure over to a chatbot.  More

Build: Local EC2 Testing with Moto and Python

Thu May 15 2025

When you’re building Python tools that work with AWS services, you don’t always want to reach into the cloud during development. It’s slow. It’s expensive. And it’s dangerous if your code’s not fully baked. That’s where Moto comes in — it mocks AWS APIs locally so you can simulate behavior and write repeatable, offline tests.  More

New Article on Medium: Redshift Reporter—A Read-Only CLI Tool for AWS Engineers

Wed May 14 2025

The Redshift Console is powerful. SQL IDEs are flexible. But sometimes, engineers need something simpler—a terminal-native interface that just shows you what’s in the warehouse without ceremony or risk. That’s what Redshift Reporter is.  More

New Article on Medium: Redshift Reporter—A Read-Only CLI Tool for AWS Engineers

Wed May 14 2025

We just launched a clean little command-line tool that makes Redshift easier to explore. Redshift Reporter gives you a menu-based CLI—list schemas, view tables, run read-only queries, and sample rows—all without firing up a SQL IDE or console session. Every command is logged automatically, so you always know what was run and when. It’s lightweight, fast, and read-only by design.  More

New Article on Medium: Manually Troubleshooting NVMe on Your Raspberry Pi

Tue May 13 2025

Want to do it all manually instead? For those brave (or slightly masochistic) Pi users who prefer running each NVMe command by hand—complete with dmesg, nvme smart-log, and a 100MB test file—we’ve got you covered. More

Solve:  So You Like to Suffer—Manually Troubleshooting NVMe on Your Raspberry Pi

Tue May 13 2025

Some folks like menus. Others like to learn by doing things the long, hard way. This post is for the latter.  More

Insight:  Moto—Your Python-Powered AWS Sandbox

Tue May 13 2025

Developing applications that interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be complex. Ensuring your code behaves as expected across various AWS services and scenarios is crucial for stability and reliability. This is where Moto, a powerful and versatile Python library, rides in to save the day!  More

Solve:  Introducing nvme_check.sh – A Safe, Friendly NVMe Diagnostic Tool for Raspberry Pi

Sun May 11 2025

Working with NVMe drives on the Raspberry Pi 5 is exciting—but it can also be frustrating. Most users aren’t sure if TRIM is working, or if their drive is mounted correctly, or why performance seems to drop over time. Worse, the common tools (hdparm, nvme-cli, fstrim, etc.) each speak their own strange dialect.

So we built a tool to make it all easier.  More

Insight: Unleash Your Inner Text Jedi with the jed Command on Ubuntu

Sat May 10 2025

Welcome, fellow Ubuntu explorers! As you delve deeper into the world of Linux, you'll quickly discover the power and flexibility of the command line. Today, we're going to introduce you to a handy little text editor called jed. Don't let the name intimidate you – it's not about lightsabers (though that would be cool!), but about efficiently editing text files right from your terminal.  More

New Article on Medium: The Broken TGW Attachment

Fri May 9 2025

When a TGW attachment got stuck in pendingAcceptance, the root cause turned out to be something subtle and frustrating: a route table deleted in another account.  More

Solve: Diagnose Broken TGW Attachments in AWS with One Shell Script

Fri May 9 2025

Sometimes the best tools aren’t born in a lab. They’re born in the wild—when a smart cloud engineer runs into something weird, digs deep, and asks the right questions.  More

Solve: TGW Attachments Fail When the Route Table Is Deleted in a Central Network Account

Thu May 8 2025

A developer in a spoke (development) AWS account attempted to create a VPC attachment to a Transit Gateway (TGW) using CloudFormation. The attachment entered a PendingAcceptance state, but the usual "Accept" option wasn’t available. Upon further inspection, the TGW route table linked to previous attachments showed as deleted. Additionally, the developer was unsure whether it was safe to delete the associated service-linked role, AWSServiceRoleForVPCTransitGateway.  More

Insight: Getting Started with SFTP File Transfers on Ubuntu

Thu May 8 2025

Welcome to the world of Ubuntu! As you explore this powerful operating system, you'll often encounter the need to securely transfer files between your machine and a remote server. That's where SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) comes in handy. Think of it as a secure and encrypted way to manage files online, just like using a file explorer on your computer, but for remote servers.  More

New Article on Medium: A Quiet Python Tool That Fixes Broken API Requests

Thu May 8 2025

Tool Spotlight: api_call_fixer.py.  A lightweight Python script that quietly fixes malformed API request files and logs every action it takes. If your CI is choking on a null method, or a junior dev accidentally pasted an empty header into production JSON, this tool will clean it up and leave behind a clear, timestamped trail of what changed.  More

New Article on Medium: A Quiet Tool That Just Might Save Your Next Cloud Deployment

Wed May 7 2025

If you’ve ever been mid-deploy and watched everything break over a malformed payload, this tool is for you. json-behave is a Python-powered JSON inspector and fixer designed to clean broken files, generate or optimize schemas, and keep a clean session log of everything it does. It runs from the terminal, needs no config files, and produces immediate results.  More

Insight: An Overview of File Transfer Tools on Your Raspberry Pi—scp, sync, rsync, and sftp

Tue May 6 2025

Welcome back to the exciting world of Raspberry Pi projects! You've probably already figured out how to SSH into your little computer, but what about moving files back and forth? Linux offers a few powerful tools to help you manage files between your main computer and your Pi. Let's take a look at some key players without getting bogged down in complicated commands.  More

Insight: Using scp as Your Trusty File Transporter for Raspberry Pi

Tue May 6 2025

Let's talk about a handy little tool you'll find yourself using quite a bit: the scp command. Think of it as your digital courier for securely moving files between your Raspberry Pi and another computer.  More

Solve: Diagnose File Persistence Issues in Linux with a Simple Shell Script

Tue May 6 2025

This post isn’t about running Ubuntu from a thumb drive. Most modern live distros like Tails, Kali, and Mint XFCE have figured out how to support persistence modes — and if you're using those systems, your distro likely documents how to enable it.  More

Solve: When Your Transit Gateway Attachment Stalls—Solving the PendingAcceptance Trap in AWS CloudFormation

Mon May 5 2025

Late one night, a cloud engineer ran into a frustrating issue: a VPC attachment to their AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) was stuck in the PendingAcceptance state. There was no obvious console option to accept it, and CloudTrail revealed a cryptic InvalidInputException linked to a duplicate AWSServiceRoleForVPCTransitGateway. If you've hit this combination of symptoms, you're not alone.  More

New Article on Medium: Building an Immune System for the Internet

Mon May 5 2025

It’s not just another DDoS attack. It’s another signal that our internet lacks immunity. This article began with a simple question: What if the internet had white blood cells? What followed was a systems-level look at routing, reflex, and the biological metaphors we might need to borrow if we’re serious about fixing a very sick network.  More

New Article on Medium:  The Quiet Tech War You’re Not Watching

Mon May 5 2025

The first quarter of 2025 saw a historic wave of cyberattacks—20 million DDoS incidents, including some of the largest ever recorded. But the real story? Most people didn’t notice.  More

Insight: The Best Logging Tools for HAM Radio on Raspberry Pi

Sun May 4 2025

If you’re building a portable or shack-side Raspberry Pi rig for HAM radio, you’ll quickly hit a familiar question: how do I log contacts without dragging in a full-blown PC? The good news is that several Linux-friendly logging tools run just fine on the Pi—some with full GUI support, others light enough to run on a Pi Zero 2 W.  More

Insight: When Your Raspberry Pi "Forgets" Everything—Here's a Shell Script to Save Your Settings

Sun May 4 2025

So you've set up a shiny new Raspberry Pi 5 as a video streamer, dashboard, classroom kiosk, or remote camera. You configure everything just the way you want it—logins, Wi-Fi, display settings, browser preferences—and then it happens: an update rolls through, or you reboot, and poof. Your settings are gone. Again.   More

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