Jacob Marks

I have two new open-source projects to announce.

I ended Moving from ChatGPT to Claude with "more once I've actually used it."

When I hear companies like Anthropic make claims that they don’t know why AI comes to some conclusion, or they suggest that Claude somehow “resorted to blackmail” to prevent itself from being shut down as featured on 60 Minutes, it makes me feel we deserve

Update, May 2026: After completing a deeper review of the CyberChef Payments work, I split the project into a small ecosystem.

I’ve been using ChatGPT and Codex for a while and I’m starting to evaluate Claude.

AWS announced support for Cartes Bancaires in AWS Payment Cryptography.

As a manager of software teams, I’ve been asked many times about the transition from building software to managing the people who build it.

Note: I originally sketched this post years ago and never finished it.

Note: I originally wrote this post in 2017 but never published it at the time.

AWS announced AWS Payment Cryptography is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.

AWS announced Multi-Region Keys in AWS Payment Cryptography.

AWS announced the launch of AWS Payment Cryptography this week, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead the service from its earliest definition through production launch.

The AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provides a capability to manage encryption keys with transparent integration to many other AWS services.

The cloud market continues to get more competitive.

*** NOTE: AWS has pulled this specific certification version, refunding those who took the original beta exam. *** 2026 Status Update: The AWS Certified Security - Specialty is now a mature, standard certification.

Implementing the Amazon Cognito User Pool Admin Authentication Flow with AWS SDK For .NET offers a path to implement user authentication without management of a host components otherwise needed to signup, verify, store and authenticate a user.

For those of us that are .NET developers at heart, we have powerful tools for running serverless C# applications on AWS.

Note: The US Government cloud security policy landscape has changed significantly since this was originally written.

Looking for a quick and easy way to query an Amazon Redshift Database Cluster?

CloudWatch includes a powerful feature that enables auto recovery of an EC2 instance if it ever fails a system status check.

Automating EBS snapshots is a critical part of maintaining a resilient infrastructure.

While newer versions of Windows Server (2022/2025) have improved, installing .NET 3.5 still frequently fails because the payload is not part of the local Side-by-Side (SxS) store.

If you're working with a Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 server that has had DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) mitigations implemented and attempting to promote that server to a domain controller, you will very likely encounter an error that…

*** UPDATE: This project was migrated from CodePlex to GitHub *** Obtaining Your Amazon SES SMTP Credentials can be more confusing than one would think.

I've found myself wondering on more than one occasion if a network issue I'm having is a result of security configuration (Routing Rules, Network ACLs, Security Groups) or something else entirely.