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My Cloud Resume Challenge: Multi-Account AWS for less than $1.00 per month

In 2022, I came across Forrest Brazeal’s Cloud Resume Challenge on LinkedIn and then his personal website. The premise is simple: build your resume as a website using cloud services. But given my developer background and current role as an AWS employee, I decided to make it harder and implement best practices in a highly cost-optimised architecture. Choosing the Hard Path I’ve played around with single page web-apps in the past using Hugo as the template engine. This was the first time I actually deployed a website outside my dev machine onto the cloud, and I wanted to have a direct link from pushing updates to the git repository through to the deployed website on S3. At the time, Code Commit and Code Pipeline were reasonable choices (Code Commit has been since deprecated and then revived… but I’ve moved on). I’ve since updated my CICD to use Github with Github Actions for the build and deploy. I also wanted to get some hands-on experience similar to my enterprise customers by provisioning a multi-account AWS Organisation with separate dev, test, and prod accounts, fully automated CI/CD infrastructure as code, to go with the completely serverless architecture.

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 Read

Building Smart Shelves: Sydney Summit 2019 Retail of the Future Exhibit

AWS needed a compelling demonstration of computer vision and machine learning capabilities for retail applications at Sydney Summit 2019. The goal was to showcase how physical retail stores could leverage AWS services for real-time inventory tracking and customer engagement through an interactive, hands-on experience for 12,000 expected attendees. As part of a 3-person team, I built the processing pipeline, AWS infrastructure, and CI/CD automation for the “Retail of the Future” exhibit featuring a replica Amazon Go store called “Smart Shelves.” Working alongside Josh Passenger (app dev, front-end) and Charles Prosper (AI/ML specialist, data prep), we had 6 weeks from initial ask to delivery—requiring 2 major pivots when the original plan to reuse existing assets fell through, and the scope expanded 2 weeks before the event to include 3 additional retail demos featuring AWS Personalize and AWS Pinpoint. These are some of the original product images we used in our model training:

Sunday, March 15, 2026 Read

Pipeline Buckling & Concrete Cracking: FEA Research That Changed Design Standards

The Browse LNG project required hundreds of kilometers of concrete coated pipelines to withstand cyclonic activity in the North West Shelf of Western Australia. Large waves and strong currents during cyclones create pipeline instability that can cause the pipeline to move along the seabed. Close to the well extraction and processing facilities, the pipelines are also under High-Pressure and High-Temperature (HPHT) and at risk of a phenomenom known as lateral buckling, where excessive strain causes the pipeline to displace into sinusoidal-like formations similar to railways buckling under the hot sun. Existing design methods either ignored the concrete’s stiffness contribution entirely or made overly conservative assumptions about its behavior under extreme combined axial and bending loads during lateral buckling. Traditional approaches applied simple strain concentration factors after the analysis was complete, missing the complex interaction between progressive concrete damage, field joint discontinuities, and the steel pipe response. This resulted in overly conservative weld specifications—smaller allowable weld flaws meant more interruptions during installation as flaws needed to be ground out and re-welded, driving up installation costs and CAPEX.

Wednesday, February 25, 2026 Read

Hosting What's New in AWS: Monthly Twitch Livestream

AWS Enterprise Support needed to increase brand awareness and raise the profile of Technical Account Managers as professional technologists and thought leaders. The challenge was creating a sustainable livestreaming program that would generate a pipeline of senior speakers capable of presenting at premier public events like AWS Summit and re:Invent, while meeting stringent benchmarks: 160 unique viewers, 25 concurrent viewers, and 17% engagement ratio per stream. As monthly host from Q4 2021 through 2023, I developed and led the “What’s New in AWS with Enterprise Support” Twitch livestream, delivering live technical commentary and demonstrations on new AWS releases across Storage, Compute, AI/ML, Database, Analytics, and Developer Tools. In 2023, the stream delivered 565 minutes of content averaging 160 unique viewers per episode with a 14.6% engagement ratio—maintaining viewership targets despite AWS Twitch paid media dropping from $575K (2022) to $95K (2023), which reduced overall AWS Twitch viewership from 4.2M to 1.3M unique viewers. Monthly TAM time investment was approximately 15 hours, with all content archived on a dedicated Enterprise Support YouTube channel.

Thursday, February 5, 2026 Read