Cloud, AI, and notes from the trenches.

We built a Transfer Agent platform on 70+ services for a Tier-1 bank. It worked. It also dragged. If I rebuilt it today I'd ship 15 to 20.

Stop calling them thinking. They're FSMs with vibes, and that reframing is what makes them debuggable.

Three quiet line items that bleed money on every AWS bill I've audited. NAT Gateway, idle compute, cross-AZ data transfer.

Three books in. Here's what I tell people who ask me why I do it while also coding full-time.