Writing (Content Migration Underway)
- Embedding Platform Engineers
Choosing between embedding platform engineers or having a central platform team is a false binary.
- AWS hosting made easy
A hobby project built in one evening on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and EventBridge for under $1/month. Full local dev parity via LocalStack and Docker Compose, with Pulumi infrastructure written by Claude Code.
- AI Native Installer
A friend wanted a blog like mine. Instead of writing them a guide, I gave them the infrastructure and an AI to install it for them.
- Will AI make me redundant?
If you can build software in a day, are our jobs going away? Not if you can get people to use your software.
- Lead Like You're Leaving
The best delivery leading I've ever done happened when I was on my way out, and delegating stuff properly.
- Meetings Mean Misalignment
If your goals are aligned, you'd be working synchronously together and not waiting on a meeting.
- TDD Vibe Coding in 2025
Use plans and TDD to write 1000+ lines of code per day without burning credits or losing your mind.
- AI Is a Bridge
AI won't make work less laborious. We'll just do more. But will we stay in control and still make beautiful things for each other?
- Engineer-Led
The smartest person in the room is often the bottleneck. That was me, and it took burning out to see that stepping back can be stepping up.
- A Plan Is A Guess
Like a weather forecast, hold your plan loosely and reforecast often.
- The Troublemaker
When you join a team, you can diagnose their problems quickly. The mistake is assuming you should immediately fix them.
Recent Personal Projects
- Family Tree new
One weekend of Claude and Codex computer-use experimentation, I uncovered my family’s migration history to Australia. The result: an interactive family tree with 146 pages of people, stories, immigration maps, and archival photos — generated from structured data and deployed as a static site on AWS.
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Sign up to my AI Powered flashcard app. Flashspeak is the love child of ANKI and ChatGPT. Want to practice speaking? It has a hand-free voice interface and will try correct your pronunciation. Sick of copy/pasting flashcard content? AI will make your cards from your content.
- Reeds new
An AI-powered blog digest that crawls tech RSS feeds, uses Claude to filter and summarise, and serves a daily top-10 page. Built on AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and EventBridge for under $1/month, with full local dev parity via LocalStack and Docker Compose.
- AWS Quill new
Self-hosted blog on AWS for ~$1/month. Clone it, run
claude, and it walks you through everything — domain registration, AWS infrastructure, GitHub CI/CD — as a conversation. -
My wife returned to work, and I had to learn to cook again. Recipe blogs suck, so I built my own recipe book, that imports recipes from any source. It includes a family meal planner and compiles our grocery list. It includes a voice assistant to help in the kitchen.
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Designed to keep birds - especially chickens - from pooping on my newly built deck. It detects birds using computer vision and sprays them with water, using a servo controlled nozzle.
- Earsight new
A test of Claude 4.6 - Turning vision into sound. 15 years ago I saw this video about vOIc and wanted to make it better. My computer didn’t have enough grunt. Now it can run from a webpage.
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Lunar lander meets pizza delivery — fly efficiently enough to cover fuel and repairs from your pizza sales, or you’re grounded. I learned Unity to help my daughters with their game, and remade a DirectX game I built in the early 2000s. Google Gemini is a lot better than ChatGPT at giving clickOps instructions.