Andrew Gilliland

ECS runs containerized applications without making you build a container orchestration platform yourself.

How to use prefetching, dependent queries, parallel requests, and targeted invalidation to solve common data-fetching problems.

How to fetch, cache, update, and invalidate API data with TanStack Query without rebuilding server-state management in every React component.

Caching can make an AWS application faster and cheaper, but the wrong cache can serve stale or private data.

Cognito can tell you who a user is, but it cannot answer what they are allowed to do.

Automatically optimize images the moment they're uploaded to S3 using Lambda functions triggered by S3 events.

Build a fast asset pipeline with a private S3 origin, CloudFront caching, custom DNS, and HTTPS certificates using AWS CDK.

SQS is AWS's managed message queue service.

The model is just token prediction.

Pi is a minimal, extensible coding agent.

How to deploy a TanStack Start SSR app to AWS using Lambda or ECS Fargate, wired together with CloudFront, S3, and CDK.

How to build an AI agent that crawls your site, observes each page, and writes Playwright spec files - without you authoring a single selector.

How to use Claude's API alongside Playwright to write semantic smoke tests that reason about page state instead of matching brittle selectors.

Machine learning sounds intimidating, but scikit-learn makes it approachable.

When your database goes down, every service that depends on it starts throwing errors.

Real data is messy.

When one Lambda isn't enough, Step Functions lets you orchestrate multi-step workflows with retries, error handling, and a full execution history built in.

The Events API is built and fast.

The architecture decisions that make a Lambda-backed API fast - per-route function layout, lean handlers, per-function dependencies, ARM64, and CDK patterns that compound into short cold starts.

What happens during a Lambda cold start, how to measure it with X-Ray and CloudWatch Logs Insights, and how to reduce it with lean packages, init code patterns, and provisioned concurrency.

Why Lambda exhausts RDS connection limits under load, and how to fix it with RDS Proxy - including CDK setup, IAM auth, and connection reuse.

How to add end-to-end tests to a React app with Playwright, including checkout flow testing for e-commerce, and run them automatically on every pull request.

Pandas is Python's answer to working with tabular data.

Finding time to work out with a full-time job and kids is hard.

Hardcoded config doesn't scale and hardcoded secrets are a security incident waiting to happen.

RDS in a private subnet doesn't need a bastion host or an open port 22.

EC2 is AWS's virtual machine service - rent compute capacity in the cloud, pay by the hour.

The Intersection Observer API lets you detect when elements enter or leave the viewport - without scroll event listeners.

SNS is AWS's pub/sub messaging service.

CloudWatch Alarms don't notify anyone on their own.

Your code is deployed.

How to set up keyless, secure continuous deployment to AWS using GitHub Actions and OIDC - and why it beats AWS-native CI/CD tools for most teams.

You already think in types from TypeScript.

A side-by-side look at Python through the lens of JavaScript.

AWS CDK lets you define cloud infrastructure with real code instead of YAML.

Write, test, and deploy a Python Lambda function from scratch.

CloudFormation uses YAML.

DynamoDB is the serverless database that pairs naturally with Lambda.

Wire up API Gateway to Lambda functions and build a serverless REST API using Python and CDK.

GitHub Actions is CI/CD built directly into GitHub.

When zip files aren't enough, container images let you package anything for Lambda.

You have an Aurora database running in AWS.

S3 is AWS's object storage service - store any file at any scale.

Lambda is AWS's serverless compute service - run code without managing servers, pay only for what you use.

Definitions for the AWS services and concepts covered across the architecture articles on this site.

Both RDS and Aurora are managed relational databases, but they're built differently.

The classic three-tier architecture - presentation, application, and data layers inside a VPC - is the foundation of most production AWS deployments.

EventBridge is a serverless event bus that connects your applications with data from AWS services, SaaS apps, and custom sources.

Stop running cdk deploy from your laptop.

If you're a JavaScript developer curious about Python, uv makes the tooling feel familiar.