Library
Articles
Longer pieces on cloud, cybersecurity, career, and the judgment behind both.
- CloudExecutive
What to do when leadership hands you a directive that doesn't add up
Across years working as a Cloud Engineer, Architect, and Team Lead, one situation has come up repeatedly enough to be worth writing down: senior leadership issues a directive that looks…
Continue Reading→ - CareerNewcomer
What Sun Tzu's engaging the enemy principle teaches about job interviews
Sun Tzu wrote about engaging an opponent constructively rather than simply overpowering them, and it's an odd fit for career advice until you notice what a job interview actually is: a structured…
Continue Reading→ - CloudPractitioner
What actually separates cloud storage from a cloud database
During a cloud computing training session I was running on AWS, a participant asked a question that comes up often enough to be worth answering properly in writing: if both storage and database…
Continue Reading→ - AIPractitioner
What happens when AI gets good enough to impersonate you
A mentor of mine, David Linthicum, recently built an AI version of himself. He called it "AI David" and treated the whole thing as a joke, a demonstration of what current tools can do. The AI picked…
Continue Reading→ - AIPractitioner
What actually causes AI hallucinations, and how trust gets built back
Generative AI can write, draw, and code well enough to feel like a genuine collaborator, right up until it confidently states something that isn't true. That failure mode has a name, hallucination…
Continue Reading→ - CloudPractitioner
Why mock exams work, and how to run one properly
Most people treat a mock exam as an optional extra, something to squeeze in if there's time before a certification exam. Running prep sessions has taught me the opposite: a well-run mock exam is…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
The real reason AWS certifications expire every three years
Earning an AWS certification feels like the finish line: you've proven you know the platform, and you're ready for a booming job market. Then you find out it expires in three years, and the finish…
Continue Reading→ - CloudExecutive
Why "it depends" is the most honest thing an architect can say
Ask any architect, cloud, enterprise, AI, doesn't matter which, the same two words eventually surface: it depends. It isn't evasion. It's an accurate description of how architectural decisions…
Continue Reading→ - CareerPractitioner
What playing investor for a day taught me about developers and the business side
We ran a role-play with my team not long ago: a mock pitch to investors, and I sat on the other side of the table as one of the people deciding whether to write a check. My developers pitched their…
Continue Reading→ - CareerPractitioner
What Sun Tzu gets right about starting a tech career
The Art of War is a strange place to look for career advice, but one piece of it turns out to translate almost directly into how someone should approach a first move into tech: know yourself, and…
Continue Reading→ - CybersecurityPractitioner
What actually controls network traffic in AWS, and why the layers matter
Most confusion about AWS network security comes down to one question people never quite settle: what's actually enforcing the rule I think I set. Traffic control in AWS happens at more than one…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
The four ways AWS stores your data, and how to actually choose between them
Picking a storage service on AWS isn't really about picking a service. It's about answering a handful of questions first: how the data will be accessed, whether it needs to persist independently of…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
The AWS Well-Architected Framework, and the tools that keep you honest to it
The Well-Architected Framework started with five pillars. It's six now, and the newest one, sustainability, has already shown up on certification exams often enough that I've seen it nearly derail a…
Continue Reading→ - AINewcomer
RAG versus CAG: two ways AI decides what to know, and when to use each
Ask an AI system a question it wasn't originally trained to answer, and it has to get the missing information from somewhere. That's what "augmented generation" actually means: the model isn't…
Continue Reading→ - CareerPractitioner
What volunteer work can buy you that a job posting can't
Every hiring cycle produces the same complaint from newer engineers: there are no entry-level jobs, or the ones that exist all want experience nobody will give you the chance to earn. The complaint…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
What it actually takes to pass an AWS certification exam
AWS certifications aren't evenly hard. The Cloud Practitioner exam is foundational and comparatively forgiving. Associate-level exams, Solutions Architect, Developer, SysOps Administrator, ask for…
Continue Reading→ - CareerNewcomer
What to do when your friend becomes your boss, or your boss becomes your friend
Can your boss be your friend. Can your friend be your boss. Both questions come up constantly in workplaces, and most advice on the subject splits into two unhelpful camps: keep work and friendship…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
What cloud computing actually means, and the three ways you can buy into it
Cloud computing sounds like it should be complicated, and the term itself doesn't help. Strip away the branding and it's a fairly plain idea: instead of buying and running your own servers, you rent…
Continue Reading→ - CybersecurityPractitioner
The three ideas that make AWS IAM make sense
Most engineers meet AWS Identity and Access Management the way they meet a fire extinguisher: they know it's there, they know it matters, and they hope they never have to look at it too closely…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
How you actually work with AWS, and who's responsible for what
Once the concepts click, the next question is practical: how do you actually touch AWS day to day, and when something goes wrong, whose problem is it? Both questions have clean answers, and both…
Continue Reading→ - CloudPractitioner
How AWS networking actually fits together, from VPCs to Direct Connect
Networking is the part of AWS that looks abstract right up until something doesn't reach the internet, or reaches it when it shouldn't have. Understanding how the pieces fit together, rather than…
Continue Reading→ - CareerPractitioner
Getting the most out of a cloud engineering bootcamp
A bootcamp compresses months or years of learning into a few intense weeks, and that compression is both the appeal and the risk. I've watched people from backgrounds with no obvious overlap with…
Continue Reading→ - CloudNewcomer
Cloud economics and the AWS map you're actually navigating
Beyond identity and access sits a layer of AWS that's less about individual services and more about how the whole system is organized: how it's paid for, how it's physically distributed, and how its…
Continue Reading→ - CloudExecutive
CAF and WAF: the difference between preparing for the cloud and running it well
Cloud adoption rarely fails because a team picked the wrong AWS service. It fails because nobody agreed, early enough, on what "ready" and "well-architected" actually mean for their specific…
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