Ai

I came across AI Warehouse while studying for the AWS AI Practitioner cert through the Stephanie Maarek course. I lost a few hours on their YouTube channel watching reinforcement learning agents figure out games from scratch, and when I found they had a downloadable Windows simulator I wanted to try it myself. Their Red Light, Green Light scenario, the one from Squid Games, lets you run different shaped agents through the course and adjust the training parameters to see what changes. ...

Most migrations don’t start because someone planned one, they start because half the organisation is already using something unsanctioned and you’re formalising it before it turns into a compliance problem. I’ve seen that across different types of tech, and the failure mode is always the same: the pilot gets all the investment and the rollout gets whatever’s left, which is usually not much. The hard part of a migration is usually the stretch between a successful pilot and a real rollout. ...

I’ve held AWS certifications since 2019, starting with Cloud Practitioner and then working through Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps, Developer Associate, and Solutions Architect Professional within about a year (It was Covid year after all). I recertified the SA Pro in 2023 and passed the AI Practitioner in February this year. The SA Pro is due again, exam’s booked for end of June, so I’m back studying. My study method has been the same every time, which is watch a Stephane Maarek course on Udemy, make notes in OneNote as I go, grind practice exams. The notes are dense and compressed, topics separated by slashes, exam questions dropped in wherever they’re relevant. The formatting is all over the place because it’s written for speed of recall, not for anyone else to read. I’ve used this approach for every cert I’ve passed and never had a reason to change it. ...

I’m recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time right now, so when I decided to build a personal site the temptation to go straight to Route53, CloudFront, S3, and Terraform was real. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini what they thought before starting, and while they disagreed on a few things they all said to use GitHub Pages and not overthink the hosting. Gemini included a cost comparison that had an EKS cluster as one of the options at £150-200/month, which is overkill for basically any website, but it helped make the point that GitHub Pages with a custom domain was the obvious starting point. I could have spent weeks on infrastructure before writing a single post, or I could just start writing. ...

I’m not a web developer I’m a senior technical architect and my day job is application compatibility, migration, and platform modernisation, figuring out why software breaks when you move it between platforms and fixing it. The tools I reach for are Sysinternals, WinDbg, and Process Hacker, not CSS and JavaScript. Building a website from scratch wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse. I’ve wanted a personal site for years but kept putting it off because I didn’t want something that looked like it was built in 2003 on GeoCities (though I do miss the flame borders). I also didn’t want to just use Squarespace or WordPress because I wanted to understand the build. When I moved into a strategy role last year where thought leadership is actually part of the job, the timing finally made sense. AI tools had collapsed the barrier too. What would have taken me weeks of learning web development took about two weeks of evenings and weekends. ...

kashifnazir.com is the first public build of my personal site: Hugo, PaperMod, GitHub Pages, and a lot of iterative work with Claude and Codex to get it from generic template to something that actually feels like mine. The project is really two things at once: a live site and a record of how it was built. That includes the design direction, the circuit motif, the decision to launch on GitHub Pages first, and the AWS architecture I deliberately chose not to build yet. ...