Deep dives into cloud engineering, automation, and continuous learning
Architecture decisions and cost optimization strategies behind rebuilding this portfolio site with AWS serverless infrastructure. How to design scalable, cost-effective web applications using S3, CloudFront, Lambda, and API Gateway while maintaining reliability and performance.
Creating a desktop application with Python and Tkinter for sending emails via AWS SES. Covering UI design, configuration management, and handling scope creep in personal projects.
Real-world lessons from implementing DMARC policies at enterprise scale. How to prevent email spoofing attacks while maintaining deliverability for legitimate business communications across complex infrastructure.
Lessons learned from managing enterprise infrastructure with Terraform at scale. State management, module organization, and CI/CD integration strategies that actually work in production environments.
Real incidents and near-misses from IAM misconfigurations in production. How to identify over-privileged roles, implement least privilege principles, and automate security reviews across your AWS organization.
The journey from solving problems in isolation to sharing knowledge openly. How documenting my learning process has improved my technical skills and helped me connect with the broader tech community.
Beyond basic scripting - PowerShell automation patterns that have saved hundreds of hours in production environments. Real examples from healthcare IT and cloud infrastructure management.
Security vulnerabilities I've seen in production APIs and how to prevent them. Authentication, rate limiting, input validation, and monitoring strategies that actually catch problems before they become incidents.
Real strategies that reduced cloud spending by 40% without impacting performance. Reserved instances, rightsizing, automated scaling policies, and the monitoring tools that made it all possible.
Moving from PowerShell to Python for cross-platform automation. File system operations, network monitoring, log analysis, and API integrations that work across Windows, Linux, and cloud environments.
Security considerations unique to serverless architectures. Environment variable management, execution role permissions, VPC configurations, and monitoring patterns that catch security issues in Lambda functions.
My experience moving from traditional healthcare IT to cloud engineering at AWS. Skills that transferred, knowledge gaps I had to fill, and certification strategies that actually helped land the role.
Setting up production-ready deployment pipelines with GitHub Actions and AWS. Security best practices, secrets management, multi-environment deployments, and rollback strategies that work under pressure.
Practical container security scanning workflows for development teams. Trivy, Snyk, and AWS ECR scanning integration with CI/CD pipelines. How to fix vulnerabilities without slowing down development.
What I learned when our healthcare IT infrastructure actually went down. The difference between theoretical DR plans and reality, automation that saved the day, and gaps we didn't know existed until it mattered.
I'm always looking for interesting technical challenges to write about. If you have a topic you'd like me to explore, let me know!