My old Windows laptop started shutting itself down in the London flat during one of the Covid heatwaves. It had enough CPU for what I was asking it to do, Windows still booted and the applications still opened, but the machine could not keep itself inside its thermal limits in the room. Cleaning the fans and repasting the CPU were the fixes that still felt mechanical, the sort of thing you could do with a small screwdriver, a tube of thermal paste and the belief that dust or bad contact was the problem. ThrottleStop came after that, because by then I was trying to get more control over the Dell’s CPU throttling and power behaviour when it hit its limits, before it decided the situation was unsafe and shut itself down. The cooling pad helped a bit, but only in the way extra airflow helps when the air being pushed around is already too warm. ...

I’m only weeks out from recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional for the second time, and most of the studying is sitting a three-hour practice exam after work and then spending another few hours going back through it afterwards. It’s an architecture exam so it does test patterns, but they’re AWS-specific service combinations, the deep single-vendor recall of one stack, and my actual days are spread across AWS, GCP, Azure, on-prem and a pile of AI tooling, jumping between Windows, Mac and Linux. The exam wants me deep in one place, and real work has been taking me wide for years. ...

The Register reported that UK entry-level tech roles fell 46 percent in 2024, with projections hitting 53 percent by the end of 2026, based on figures from the Institute of Student Employers. Most of the commentary points at AI as the cause, and AI is doing something, but the ladder into architecture has been eroding for over a decade and the AI piece is just the wave you can see right now. The earlier waves were quieter and they did most of the damage well before agents showed up. ...

The AI Builders Breakfast Before the main programme opened there was a smaller invite-only session called the AI Builders Breakfast, which I hadn’t known about when I wrote the pre-Summit piece and only found out about after. It ended up being the part of the day I got the most out of. The room was smaller than anything else I sat in all day and the conversations were about what’s actually hard rather than what’s being announced. ...

I’ve been to plenty of vendor events and briefings over the years but never an AWS Summit, so heading to London on Wednesday for the first time I genuinely don’t know what to expect. I’m planning to get there when doors open at 8am partly to beat the keynote crowds and partly because I’ve already had to make some hard choices about how the day runs. Picking the Sessions I had four sessions I wanted to attend: the keynote on agentic AI, a workshop on rapid prototyping with Kiro, a zero trust for AI security session, and a fast-track VMware migration workshop. Some run 2–3 hours, the zero trust session clashes directly with Kiro, and doing all of them would mean spending the entire day in rooms with no time to actually see any of it, so I’ve cut two. I’m skipping the keynote, which at my first AWS Summit feels like it should be a bigger deal than it is, and dropping the AI security session because it runs at the same time as Kiro and that’s not a close call. The keynote will be streamed and I’ll catch it later. The VMware workshop and Kiro are what I’m actually there for. ...

Hardware gets kept because it runs what it’s always run, and the refresh conversation gets deferred because nothing appears broken. The ceiling only shows up when someone tries to do something new on top of it. I had that exact experience last Saturday trying to containerise the apps on my home server. The Plan I’ve been wanting to use containers more outside of just reading about them, so running them at home on something real was the obvious next step. Set up a git repo for version control, VS Code as the editor, and OpenAI’s Codex to handle the agentic coding tasks directly on the machine, so I had everything in place to move quickly on something I hadn’t done before. The plan was to start with one small component and see how it handled it before doing anything else. ...