Kevin London

I let an AI agent work through my backlog over a weekend.

At 16 I passed off a Twilight Zone episode's plot as my own short film.

Fable 5 costs 2x Opus and burns like 6x.

I don't hand-write code anymore.

You don't start with parallelism.

I copied 27 Claude commands and realized it wasn't doing me any favors.

Light Iron announced it was winding down.

Working with AI isn't a binary skill.

Some of my best ideas used to die before anyone saw them.

My promo journey at Amazon took two years from when I first thought I was ready.

Python's dynamic nature can lead to subtle bugs that are hard to catch.

In part 2 of my dangerous Python functions series, I cover more risky functions like pickle.loads(), yaml.load(), and tempfile.mktemp().

I had a tough career decision to make, so a manager suggested this simple quadrant exercise.

Working with AI changed what I'm willing to attempt.

Some feedback is easy to act on.

Why do some conversations click while others fall flat?

Lessons from my journey to Staff Engineer at Snap.

A colleague asked me why I write, and it got me thinking.

AI coding tools are everywhere, and each step feels reasonable.

I tried building a game with AI, and it was an interesting journey.

My career path has been a bit unusual, from film school to software engineering.

I migrated my old Jekyll blog to Astro using AI tools.

I've made every money mistake possible, from not saving enough to investing poorly.

I came across Python code that used `is` to check if a string was "red" or "blue," which felt wrong.

When I took over one-on-ones for a team of 8 engineers at Amazon, I needed a framework to make these meetings valuable.

I've been helping a friend prepare for technical interviews by running mock interviews and offering feedback.

I recently concluded a job search and landed at Snapchat.

When you need to backfill data, it's easy to cause problems.

Today's my last day after four years at Amazon.

Giving feedback to engineers is one of the most important skills for tech leads and managers.

We built a new service that handled 20x more traffic than expected.

We all get stuck.

I've gone between software engineering and film for most of my career.

The Princess and the Pea fairy tale perfectly captures a problem I see in software teams.

Don't bake a cake became my shorthand for a common problem in software teams.

I recently passed the AWS Solutions Architect - Associate exam and wanted to share my study notes.

I'm usually skeptical of certification programs, but AWS certifications felt different.

I got into credit card churning a few years ago, and it's become a rewarding hobby.

Three years after my first code review best practices post, I've learned even more about what makes reviews effective.

A friend asked me what I've used to improve as a software engineer.

In the final part of my dangerous Python functions series, I cover more security risks including assert statements, XML parsing vulnerabilities, and unsafe input handling.

In part 2 of my DevOps from Scratch series, we'll take our Flask app from local development to production on AWS using Terraform for infrastructure automation and Ansible for deployment.

Ever wondered how to build and deploy a web app from scratch?

Refactoring can be hard to explain to stakeholders who don't code.

I gave a talk using the "two trains" analogy to explain technical debt and refactoring.

I used to hate writing tests—they felt like a waste of time, took forever to run, and broke constantly.

Job hunting can feel like shopping for a new car—exciting at first, then intimidating and hopeless.

Preparing for a technical talk can feel overwhelming, but I've learned something new every time I've given one.

I found a list of Django security questions but couldn't find clear answers anywhere.

After talking about Bandit, I wanted to see how it actually performed in the real world.