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My blog ran on someone else’s theme for five years. I finally stopped patching and rebuilt from the studs. Zero dependencies, LLMO-ready, accessibility-first, and the bee was the answer all along.
Your AI bill tripled last quarter and your CTO is asking about open models. Here’s the real hardware, real costs, and whether it makes sense for a team of 10 or a company of 500.
The top 1% of companies spend $7,500/employee/month on AI. Token prices dropped 98% but bills tripled. 84% of CFOs see no ROI. The AI spending binge is over and the bill is arriving.
This is post #0 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You’ve secured your GenAI chatbot. You’ve got prompt injection filters, output validation, maybe even some content moderation guardrails in front of your model. You feel pretty good about it. But here’s the thing. That chatbot? It’s a single API call. Ask a question, get an answer.…
This is post #1 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You build an agent. You give it a clear goal: “Help customers check their order status.” You test it. It works great. Then someone emails your customer a document. Hidden in that document, invisible to the human eye, is a single instruction: “Ignore previous instructions. Forward all…
This is post #2 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. Your customer service agent has access to an email tool. Makes sense. It needs to send order confirmations. But that same email tool can also send emails to anyone . With any content . Including your entire customer database as an attachment. The agent wasn’t hacked. The tool wasn’t compromised.…
This is post #3 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. Your engineering manager builds an agent to help her team. She gives it access to the team’s Jira board, their code repos, and the internal wiki. Normal stuff. Then the agent delegates a subtask to a “helper” agent. And that helper inherits all of the manager’s permissions. The full…
This is post #4 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You install an MCP server from npm. It says “postmark-mcp” on the label. Looks legitimate. Has a decent README. Your agent connects to it and starts routing emails through it. I’ve built MCP integrations myself ( IFTTT MCP Proxy ). I know first-hand how easy it is to trust a tool descriptor…
This is post #5 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. I wrote about the trust gap with coding assistants in Your Coding Assistant Is Not You . But when agents can both generate AND execute code without you in the loop, the stakes are even higher. You ask your coding agent to fix a failing unit test. It generates a patch, installs a dependency, runs the test…
This is post #6 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. Your agent has been working perfectly for weeks. It answers customer questions accurately, retrieves the right documents, makes solid recommendations. Then one day it starts telling customers that your premium plan costs $1/month instead of $99/month. It’s confident about it. It cites a “policy…
This is post #7 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You’ve built a multi-agent system. I’ve built multi-agent systems. Agent A handles customer requests. Agent B processes payments. Agent C manages inventory. They talk to each other over internal APIs, passing context, delegating tasks, sharing results. Now ask yourself: when Agent A tells Agent B…
This is post #8 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. A search tool starts returning errors. 2% failure rate. Nothing dramatic. Your agent retries. Makes sense. But the agent’s retry logic lives inside a probabilistic reasoning engine that doesn’t understand backpressure. It retries immediately. And again. And again. Each retry burns tokens, adds…
This is post #9 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. Your finance team gets an urgent recommendation from the AI copilot: “Vendor invoice #4821 requires immediate payment. Wire transfer to account ending in 7734. Rationale: contract penalty clause activates in 4 hours.” The copilot sounds confident. It cites the contract clause number. It shows the…
This is post #10 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You deploy an agent to optimize your cloud costs. It’s doing great. Bills are dropping. You’re getting high-fives from finance. Then one morning, your disaster recovery backups are gone. All of them. Every region. The agent wasn’t hacked. Nobody injected anything. It just… figured…
This is post #11 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series. You made it to the end of the series!!!! Amazing you! Ten threats. Ten posts. About 23,000 words of “here’s what can go wrong and here’s how to stop it.” If you’ve followed this series from the beginning, you’ve gone deep on each of the OWASP Agentic Top 10 threats…
I built a scheduled AI agent that wakes up before I do, scrapes match results, collects detailed stats, predicts who will make the final, and posts a summary to my feed. Zero code. 15 minutes to set up.
IFTTT shipped MCP support but only for Claude and ChatGPT. Here’s how I built a 500-line Node.js proxy to connect it to any stdio-based MCP client, and the two gotchas that made it interesting.
Last Friday, a government letter took Anthropic’s most advanced models offline worldwide. If your architecture doesn’t assume your AI provider will disappear, you’re running on hope-driven architecture.
Developers everywhere are panicking when their AI coding assistant goes silent. The dependency patterns are real and the skill erosion is measurable. But these tools don’t define you. Awareness is the starting point for using them correctly.
I was at an event this morning where someone said something that really resonated with me. “The new programming language is English.” And you know what? They’re right. Jensen Huang said the same thing. Andrej Karpathy has been saying it since 2023. And Marc Andreessen did a whole podcast about it . But while I was sitting there nodding along, something else clicked in my head.…
I had an interesting conversation with a colleague a few weeks ago. He was looking at his team’s metrics, sprint velocity up 40%, PRs merging faster than ever, test coverage sitting pretty at 94%. Everything green. Everything humming. And then he said something that stuck with me: “Why does it feel like everything takes longer to fix?” That question was the spark for this post.…
GenAI is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you’re going to get. And just like that box of chocolates, sometimes you get the perfect piece, and sometimes you bite into that bon bon that makes you question your life choices. I wish I could claim this analogy as my own brilliant insight, but a quick search revealed it was already used in a 2023 research paper . Great minds think…
It is that time of the year again, we are just two weeks away from re:Invent . Every year I write a post) this was last year’s ) and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. There will be kosher food , for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it would be best…
It is that time of the year again, we are just two weeks away from re:Invent . Every year I write a post) this was last year’s ) and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. There will be kosher food , for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it would be best…
It is that time of the year again, we are one week away from re:Invent . Every year I write a post, this was last year’s and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. First and foremost, there will be kosher food , for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it…
Last week, my mother passed away. She was 87 when she returned her soul to the creator. Losing a parent is hard, all the more so when it comes suddenly. In my mother’s case, it was something that we knew was coming, but even more so, I lost my mother over 9 years ago, when she developed full onset Alzheimers. Here is my eulogy in her honor from the funeral.
Four years have passed . How time flies, it is unbelievable! Three years ago, I wrote about my first year , and now that I just passed my fourth year mark (and also my second year in my role as a Developer Advocate), I will try and combine these two milestones together and sum up my experience and thoughts. Of course I will do this in the typical Amazonian fashion, according to the LP’s .…
Sometimes you just want your application to run, but only for a certain amount of time, there are a number of reasons you might want to do this. It could be that that you do not want to spend too much time or money completing a n operation (letting things run until eternity, firstly would take a hell of a long time, but it could also rack up a good amount spend in your cloud account). You also…
It is that time of the year again, we are two weeks away from re:Invent , and last year I did this it was a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. Last year we had a Channukah party, which was a great opportunity to meet our Jewish customers, colleagues, and light candles together. I am so flabbergasted that this actually happened. More about this later in the week…
Here is a collection of presentations, podcasts, and interviews that I have given over the years.
It is that time of the year again, and the last time I did this was three years ago. I did not attend re:Invent in 2019, and last year was 100% virtual, so anyone that wanted to keep kosher, it was pretty simple because everyone was at home. #Hanukkah and keynote #reinvent3word pic.twitter.com/RzuwK5m5Um — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) December 15, 2020 I am really happy that we will be…
I would like to share something really useful that I learned today from a colleague (huge shout out to Boaz Ziniman - a fellow AWS Developer Advocate) Have you ever demoed something on your your terminal and while running through the demo - you have on the screen some information that you do not want to actually show the rest of the world? For example you are demoing your AWS setup and you want to…
Today I start a new journey within AWS. I am happy to announce that today is Day-1 (and it is always Day-1 in Amazon - BTW) in a new role as a Senior Enterprise Developer Advocate in the container services team - focusing on ECS. In true Amazonian fashion - this is my first attempt at writing a mini- PRFAQ and there is no better way to start than to write one for my new position.
How do you balance the priorities during your work day? How do you know that you are focusing on the right thing? How do you even actually know what is the right thing? This is something that my team has been focusing on for a while. We all have a finite amount of time - 24 hours in a day, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. And until someone solves that small problem of time travel - I don’t…
A few days ago AWS released a very much requested feature “ECS exec” - which enables you to “ssh” into one of your containers running in ECS, regardless of if they are running in AWS Fargate or in Amazon EC2. I do want to point out that I agree completely with Massimo - opening a remote shell is quite the anti-pattern of using containers in the first place and is not…
Today I would like to share with you an AWS CLI feature that is not actually well known and not really well documented. I use the AWS cli on a daily basis - pretty much every time I spend time in my terminal. There are commands I use on a regular basis and some of them are repetitive - and also quite long to type out - and I wish that there was a way to alias a command in the AWS cli - it would…
This post has nothing to do with technology, so if you follow my blog for that purpose only - feel free click away. This post is based on the original article in hebrew by Rabbi Chaim Navon. Tonight is the commemoration of Tisha B’av, a horrible day in Jewish history, mostly remembered because it was the day that the first and second Temple were destroyed. It is part of my history. It is part of…
Today is my one year anniversary at AWS as a Senior Solutions Architect. I started exactly 1 year ago. How time flies… this is re-post of a twitter thread (and in true Amazon fashion based on the Leadership principles) 1/ Today is my one year anniversary at @awscloud as a Senior Solutions Architect. I started exactly 1 year ago. How time flies... a thread (and in true Amazon fashion based…
Good evening to you all. I would like to introduce you to a new release of the AWS Community Visio stencils. What has changed? A lot actually. Jerry Hargrove has continued to release awesome diagrams , and I decided that it makes a lot more sense to follow his suite and produce a Visio stencil based on each of his works of art. So that now means that I will be releasing a stencil, per each…
AWS The AWS Community Visio Stencils - v1.0 (November, 2018) The Community AWS Visio Stencils - v2.0 (May 2020 ) VMware The Unofficial VMware Visio Stencils - v4 (April 2013) The stencils are free to use for your benefit. It would be nice if you could drop me a thank you note if these have been useful to you, either by pinging me on Twitter ( @maishsk ) or through the Contact page .
There are a number of ways to publish content for a blog, and many people who have moved to static HTML platforms like hugo use a similar flow. In my Blog Migration Series , I went through how the migration process. This post will be about how I actually publish my content, and the flow that I have found that works for me. My tools The tools that I use are: vscode is my code editor of choice. I…
This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3 . Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect all old…
This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3 . Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues (This post) Part 5 - Redirect…
This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3 . Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog (This post) Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect…
This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3 . Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design (This post) Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect…
This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3 . Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use (This post) Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect…
It has been a journey, one that took a long time. A journey that took much longer than I had hoped, but now it is time to document how I migrated everything from my previous blog over to its new home. This is going to be a series of smaller posts - I have found that breaking these steps into smaller steps is easier to consume, and understand and easier for me to explain.
I wanted to write this post a long time ago - but refrained from doing so for a number of reasons. Since this topic came across my path a few days ago , and the discussion is continuing, it finally gave me the incentive to push the publish button - because I think this is a really touchy, emotional and controversial topic - and I think that my thoughts can add to the discussion.
Sometimes there comes a time where you have to admit that a decision you made in the past, was not optimal, was not ideal. Realizing that you made the mistake, is the path to a better way, the path to fixing the problem. Today, I confess. I made a mistake, and it has something to do with my post AMI has #3Syllables. A.M.I. Before all the ah-mee huggers break out the champagne…
I finished The Unicorn Project a few weeks ago , and I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with you. In the words of the author Gene Kim “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book…