Building a Data Mart in Amazon Redshift: A Practical Guide Problem

Sat Aug 2 2025

Teams using Amazon Redshift often struggle with a paradox: they know Redshift excels at analytical workloads and can support focused data marts, but when it's time to build one, they face decision paralysis. Should they create a full enterprise data warehouse? Use flat tables? Which Redshift features actually matter? The lack of clear, practical guidance leads to projects that either become overly complex with unnecessary ETL pipelines and modeling layers, or overly simplistic with denormalized tables that become unmaintainable as data grows.  More

The Group Theory of Data: Why Netflix's Recommendations Work Like Mathematical Magic

Sat Aug 2 2025

It's Friday night, you're scrolling through Netflix, and suddenly there it is—a show you've never heard of that turns out to be exactly what you needed. How did Netflix know you'd love a Korean zombie series when you've been watching British baking competitions? Or that you'd get obsessed with a documentary about chess players when your viewing history is mostly rom-coms?  More

Why Companies Like Netflix and Airbnb Use Amazon Redshift Data Marts (And You Should Too)

Sat Aug 2 2025

Picture this: You're the head of marketing at a growing e-commerce company. Black Friday is approaching, and you need to know which product categories performed best last year, which customer segments to target, and how much inventory to prepare. But getting these answers requires emailing three different departments, waiting for IT to run reports, and then trying to piece together data from various spreadsheets that somehow never quite match up.  More

Solve: Fixing Poisoned Dynamic References in CloudFormation

Wed July 30 2025

A CloudFormation update fails due to a Secrets Manager dynamic reference that no longer resolves. Even after removing the reference from the template, CFN still attempts to evaluate the broken reference — blocking further updates and leaving the stack stuck.  More

New Article on Medium: AI Built My AWS Stack 

Wed July 30 2025

What happens when an AI coding agent builds an AWS app from scratch — S3 to Lambda to ECS to Snowflake — entirely inside a local sandbox? In this walkthrough, I break down LocalStack CEO Waldemar Hummer’s live demo at the July LocalStack meetup.  More

New Article on Medium: Azure on LocalStack

Tue July 29 2025

The local cloud development landscape just got more interesting. LocalStack, the go-to tool for AWS local development, has quietly rolled out Azure service emulation—and it's opening up fascinating possibilities for multi-cloud development.  More

Solve: Testing Azure Blob Storage in LocalStack—A Complete Guide Introduction

Tue July 29 2025

LocalStack has become an invaluable tool for developers who want to test cloud services locally without incurring costs or dealing with complex cloud setups. While LocalStack's AWS emulation is mature and well-documented, its Azure support is still in alpha—which means it's functional but comes with some important caveats.  More

Solve: Testing Azure Blob in LocalStack...And What to Do When Terraform Fails

Tue July 29 2025

Step 1: Create a Python virtual environment (Terminal #1)... More

Build: Building Bulletproof Aurora—A Production Guide to Multi-Region Failover, Recovery, and Resilience

Sat July 26 2025

In a previous post, we covered how to route user traffic to region-specific Aurora shards using Node.js. That gave us lower latency and regulatory compliance — but what happens when one of those regions goes down? Multi-region systems sound resilient on paper. But when real-world cloud hiccups hit — a DNS outage, a cluster crash, or a full regional event — your app has to do more than panic. It needs a plan. This post is about what that plan can look like.  More

Solve: Multi-Region DB Latency and Compliance on AWS

Sat July 26 2025

A Y Combinator–stage startup is using a single AWS-hosted relational database but experiencing performance issues from users in other regions. Worse yet, compliance regulations prohibit data from crossing regional boundaries. They want low latency, minimal complexity, and strong data residency.  More

🧠 Insight: Test Your Python Skills With These Brain Teasers 🐍

Fri July 25 2025

Let’s play a game. Below are a few seemingly innocent Python snippets. You guess what happens. Answers and explanations follow, but no peeking. Unless you’re one of those people.  More

🐱 Build: Use AWS Services to Build a CatGram App

Fri July 25 2025

You’re building CatGram — Instagram for cats. Simple concept: users upload cat photos, the app creates thumbnails, stores metadata, and serves photos to other users.  More

New Article on Medium: AWS Brain Teaser—Build CatGram

Thu July 24 2025

We just published a new article on Medium about building AWS systems. Instead of another "copy these commands" tutorial, we created an interactive brain teaser where YOU make the architectural decisions.  More

New Article on Medium: Python Brain Teasers

Wed July 23 2025

New Medium article just dropped:  "Python Brain Teasers: #5 Will Make You Rethink Your Life Choices". These aren’t just gimmicks — they’re real quirks that actually show up in production code.  More

Insight: Unlock AWS Development Locally—Why LocalStack is Your New Best Friend

Wed July 23 2025

You're excited about the cloud. You've heard about AWS (Amazon Web Services) and its incredible power, scalability, and seemingly endless possibilities for building modern applications. But as you start exploring, a few concerns might surface: "How do I learn all these services without breaking the bank?" or "What if I accidentally mess something up in a live environment?"  More

Insight: Why Oracle Linux is Perfect for Your Home Lab & Learning Journey

Wed July 23 2025

Your home lab isn't just a collection of hardware; it's your personal playground, your classroom, and your innovation hub. It's where you learn, experiment, and build the skills that will propel your career or simply satisfy your curiosity. And when it comes to choosing the operating system for your next project, you want something powerful, reliable, and, ideally, free.  More

Insight: Successful Startups Ship Quickly...And You Can Too

Sun July 20 2025

The most successful startup leaders think about engineering decisions completely differently. Instead of asking “What’s the right way to build this?” they ask “What’s the fastest way to test if this matters?"  More

New Article on Medium: Why the Smartest Engineering Teams Often Ship the Slowest

Sun July 20 2025

While your engineering team debates the perfect API architecture, three competitors just shipped imperfect solutions and started learning what customers actually want. Sound familiar?  More

New Article on Medium: Three Stories About Corporate AI Adoption

Thu July 17 2025

We just published a deep dive on Medium exploring a scenario playing out in companies everywhere: employees using personal AI accounts for work because their organizations haven't provided approved tools yet.  More

Insight: Using AI at Work—Three Professionals Caught Between Expectations and Policies 

Thu July 17 2025

It’s 2025, and the pressure to “leverage AI for productivity gains” is everywhere. In boardrooms, performance reviews, and quarterly calls, the message is clear: work smarter, move faster, do more with less. But what happens when the tools to achieve these goals aren’t officially available? Here are three stories from the front lines of corporate AI adoption.  More

New Article on Medium: Why MCP Servers are Essential for Enterprise AI

Wed July 16 2025

AI is moving fast—and sometimes faster than a company’s ability to protect its own data. Too often, sensitive documents are uploaded to public AI tools without context or control.  More

Insight: Why MCP Servers Are Critical for Enterprise Data Protection

Wed July 16 2025

Let’s say you work at a company that handles countless confidential PDFs — contracts, internal reports, patient records, anything sensitive. You’re hoping to get some AI help reviewing one of them. So you log into your personal account, open your favorite chatbot — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — upload the confidential PDF, and say: “Hey, could you read this file and tell me what it says?” What just happened?  More

Solve: Debugging 'Messages in Flight'— A Systematic Guide to Unsticking AWS SQS in Document Processing Pipelines Introduction

Wed July 16 2025

The AI boom has transformed document processing from a niche enterprise need into a mainstream requirement. Teams everywhere are building pipelines that ingest PDFs, extract text with AWS Textract, and feed the results into RAG systems for intelligent document search. It's an exciting time to be building these systems—but also a frustrating one when things go wrong.  More

New Article on LinkedIn: The Mathematical Foundation of Every Audio Technology You Use

Mon July 14 2025

Why does your smartphone's music sound so crisp? How do noise-canceling headphones create perfect silence? What makes voice calls possible across continents? The answer traces back to 1807, when a mathematician studying heat flow accidentally discovered the mathematical DNA of sound itself.  More

Python Basics: Mastering the Print Command

Wed July 9 2025

Welcome to our Python 101 series! Today, we’ll explore the essential print command, which is used to display output in Python. This simple yet powerful function enables you to visualize data and communicate with users. Let’s dive in!  More

Solve: When SELECT Queries Hit the Wrong Aurora Node

Thu July 10 2025

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is a marvel of modern infrastructure. It replicates data across multiple availability zones. It scales up and down with near-instant elasticity. It provides multiple endpoints so your app can route reads and writes efficiently.  More

Insight: Oracle Now Runs Natively Inside AWS — And That Changes Everything

Thu July 10 2025

This week, something subtle but important happened: Oracle Database became a fully integrated part of the AWS experience. You can now launch, manage, and monitor Oracle directly from the AWS Console — just like you would with RDS or Aurora.  More

New Article on Medium: Oracle Just Became an AWS Service

Wed July 9 2025

Oracle is now deployable and manageable from inside the AWS Console—fully integrated with IAM, CloudWatch, VPC Lattice, and S3. That means no more bolt-on Oracle. No more duct tape. For the first time, Oracle fits into your AWS architecture like any other native service.  More

Solve: Patch the STIG Mapping Mismatch in EC2 Image Builder for Amazon Linux 2023

Tue July 8 2025

Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) is being STIG-hardened via EC2 Image Builder components that assume a RHEL8 baseline. This causes SELinux to be skipped and key security steps to fail silently. The result? Hardened-in-name-only images that fall short of compliance and security goals.  More

Insight: Misaligned Expectations—STIG Hardening for Amazon Linux 2023 and the RHEL Confusion

Tue July 8 2025

If you're using EC2 Image Builder to STIG-harden Amazon Linux 2023, heads up—you're likely mapped against the wrong OS baseline. AL2023 is being treated like RHEL8, but it aligns more closely with RHEL9 or Fedora. That misalignment causes real issues: SELinux isn’t installed, some packages are missed, and the hardening script quietly skips critical steps. This isn’t a beginner’s problem—it’s one of those senior DevOps calls where you either override the mapping or rebuild the compliance path yourself. Here's what we’re seeing and why it matters.  More

New Article on LinkedIn: The Victorian Mathematician Who Predicted Your Smartphone

Sat July 5 2025

What if the mathematical principles powering your iPhone were invented 200 years ago? In 1991, engineers at London's Science Museum held their breath as they turned the brass crank of a magnificent 5-ton machine. Gears clicked, wheels turned, and suddenly—mathematical perfection. The machine calculated complex tables with flawless precision, proving that designs from 150 years earlier were not only correct, but revolutionary.  More

Solve: Optimizing Aurora PostgreSQL with PgPool-II – A Recipe for Robust Connection Management and Load Balancing

Thu July 3 2025

Your Aurora PostgreSQL database is exhibiting performance bottlenecks, including high connection counts, uneven load across read replicas, or a struggle to efficiently manage read and write operations. Your applications might be experiencing latency or instability, indicating a need for a more robust middleware solution.  More

Solve: Optimizing Aurora PostgreSQL with PgPool-II – A Recipe for Robust Connection Management and Load Balancing

Thu July 3 2025

Your Aurora PostgreSQL database is exhibiting performance bottlenecks, including high connection counts, uneven load across read replicas, or a struggle to efficiently manage read and write operations. Your applications might be experiencing latency or instability, indicating a need for a more robust middleware solution.  More

Solve: Unlocking High Performance Aurora PostgreSQL with PgCat – A Recipe for Modern Connection Management

Wed July 2 2025

Your application is struggling with database performance, experiencing slow response times, connection errors, or high CPU utilization on your Aurora PostgreSQL cluster. You suspect the way your application interacts with the database, particularly concerning connection management and query routing, is a significant bottleneck.  More

Insight: Navigating PostgreSQL in AWS Aurora—Why Your Reads Aren't Scaling and How to Fix It

Wed July 2 2025

Ever scratch your head wondering why your perfectly scaled Aurora PostgreSQL cluster still seems to have a bottleneck on the primary database, even with all those shiny read replicas? You're not alone. The challenge of effectively routing database queries in a highly distributed, cloud-native environment like AWS Aurora is a common pain point. It's not just about having more database instances; it's about making sure your applications use them correctly.  More

Insight: From Chaos to Control Plane—Is EKS Really That Much Easier Than On-Prem Kubernetes?

Tue July 1 2025

When I came across a post from an SRE managing an on-prem Kubernetes cluster on RHEL, it struck a chord. Every day brought a new issue: master nodes dropping off, worker nodes becoming unreachable, and endless layers of network and VM complexity to peel back. Anyone who’s operated Kubernetes on bare metal or traditional virtualization knows the drill — it’s a daily dance with entropy, and your only partner is kubectl and hope.  More

Insight: Why Aurora’s Reader Endpoint Isn’t Enough—The Real Problem with Query Routing

Tue July 1 2025

Aurora PostgreSQL makes a beautiful promise: scale reads with a simple reader endpoint and keep your writer node clean. You spin up replicas, wire your app to the provided DNS name, and expect the load to distribute itself. It feels seamless — until you realize your writer instance is still carrying the weight of most SELECT queries. Something’s not right. The infra looks healthy. The DNS is resolving. But the query traffic is misbehaving.  More

Solve: How to Modularize Your SAM Templates Without Breaking sam sync

Tue July 1 2025

The AWS SAM CLI has grown into a powerful developer toolset, and sam sync is one of its most welcome additions. It lets you update your deployed application fast, skipping a full CloudFormation round trip and keeping your edit-deploy-test loop tight. But there's a catch: sam sync expects a flat, ready-to-go template.yaml. That can make modularization difficult. If you're breaking your SAM template into smaller files for clarity and reuse, you risk breaking compatibility with sam sync—unless you finish the thought.  More

Solve: Teaching SAM to Share—Splitting template.yaml into Multiple Files

Tue July 1 2025

A cloud engineer working in a growing team project recently ran into a small but familiar problem. Their AWS SAM project had ballooned into a single, unwieldy template.yaml file. At first it was fine—just a function or two, an API definition, maybe a table. But weeks later, with new teammates and added resources, the file had become a cluttered wall of YAML. The engineer didn’t want to migrate away from SAM, but they did want a way to split things up. “Can I just divide this into multiple files somehow?” they asked.  More

Insight: What Kind of “Radio” Is This? Understanding the New Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2

Mon Jun 30 2025

When Raspberry Pi Ltd announced the Radio Module 2—or RM2 for short—some makers got excited for all the wrong reasons. “Finally!” they thought. “A Pi-branded SDR? An FM tuner module?” Not quite. The name may conjure visions of antennae scanning shortwave bands, but that’s not what we’re dealing with here. The RM2 is a 2.4 GHz wireless communication module, built for Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth, not audio broadcasting.  More

Solve:  Diagnosing Aurora PostgreSQL Query Routing Issues

Fri Jun 27 2025

When your Aurora PostgreSQL cluster starts slowing down, the first thing many engineers think about is scaling. Maybe your app grew. Maybe you need a bigger instance. But sometimes, the issue isn't size—it's traffic routing.  More

Solve: ECS-CDK Deploys and the Timing Trap—Notes from the Field

Wed Jun 25 2025

This isn’t the kind of issue you catch in tutorials. It’s the kind that quietly eats your morning, just when you thought you were ready to deploy.  More

Solve: ECS Rollouts and Rollbacks—How to Keep Your CDK Deployments from Breaking in Production

Wed Jun 25 2025

By now, you've solved the initial ECS deploy paradox and safely updated your service to use your real container image. That means you’ve gone from “why won’t this even launch?” to “we’re deploying our own code into ECS now.”  More

Solve: Safely Updating ECS Task Definitions After the First Deploy

Tue Jun 24 2025

Once you’ve gotten past the ECS-CDK bootstrap problem—by deploying with a placeholder image and letting your pipeline build the real one—you’re faced with a quieter but equally important moment: how do you safely update your ECS service to use your real container image?  More

Solve: Fixing the ECS-CDK First Deploy Error—The Real-World Solution

Mon Jun 23 2025

When you're deploying an ECS service with AWS CDK for the first time, and that service depends on a Docker image in ECR, you're likely to hit a frustrating wall. CloudFormation fails, ECS can’t launch, and the deploy process collapses—not because your code is broken, but because of the order in which everything is expected to exist.  More

New Article on Medium: How Cloudflare Defeated a 7.3 Tbps DDoS Monster

Thu Jun 19 2025

A new record has been set - for the size of a cyber attack and for the impressive defense that stopped it. Our latest article dives deep into how Cloudflare successfully blocked a monumental 7.3 Terabits per second Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in mid-May 2025.  More

Solve: How to Write Data Back When Redshift Sharing Says No

Wed Jun 18 2025

If you’ve tried to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE a Redshift table received via data sharing, you’ve already seen the wall: Redshift doesn’t allow writes on shared (external) tables. It’s not a permission issue. It’s not a bug. It’s the design.  More

Insight: Why You Can’t INSERT into Shared Redshift Tables—And What to Do Instead

Wed Jun 18 2025

Data sharing in Amazon Redshift makes it easy to expose tables from one cluster (or namespace) to another—often across teams, accounts, or organizations. But when you try to go beyond simple reads, you may run into an unexpected wall.  More

New Article on Medium: What Happened to My API? Let the Report Tell You

Tue Jun 17 2025

Ever stared at CloudWatch logs during an outage, trying to make sense of retries, throttles, and spiraling latency? Yep, me too. So we built a small Python tool to help.  More

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

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