Hello Reader, Are you thinking about becoming an AWS Solutions Architect and working at top companies? Data shows that Solution Architects earn between $200,000/year and $500,000+/year. When looking into becoming an SA it's really common to get overwhelmed and discouraged real quick. The number of potential paths.Countless certifications.You're not sure what to focus on, and what you REALLY need. Not to mention the impossible task of getting recruiter's attention. And even when you do - how...
about 23 hours ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Back in 2025 at AWS, as a L7 Principal Solutions Architect, I was building many customer Gen AI chatbots. We threw entire PDFs into the system and wondered why responses were garbage. “RAG is simple,” we thought. “Just embed documents and query them.” We were so wrong. Today, everyone’s jumping on the RAG bandwagon. But most are making the same mistakes I made two years back. In this newsletter, we’re going deep into the hidden mechanics of RAG that actually determine success or...
2 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, As a former Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, and Distinguished Cloud Architect at Verizon, I conducted 300+ interviews. And every cloud interview has this question. Every. Single. One. "How will you make your application scalable for a big traffic day?" And almost every candidate gives the same answer: "I'll use an Auto Scaling Group with EC2s and a load balancer to distribute traffic." Technically correct. Completely average. Three years ago that answer was fine. Today it...
4 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, "Are microservices better than monolith?" - this is a very popular interview question and real world project topic. Another variation of this is asking differences between monolith and microservices. Let me clear something up right away: monolith is not the bad guy. When I conducted hundreds of interviews at AWS as Principal Solutions Architect, I have seen candidates walk into interviews ready to trash the monolith and declare microservices the winner. That is the wrong move....
7 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, The way agents are built just changed. AWS published a new library this week that lets you write prompts directly inside your code, and the LLM generates the actual logic at runtime. Just a comment describing what you want. Here is what that looks like in practice. Instead of writing a full Python function to pull 30 days of stock data from Yahoo Finance, you write one line: "Use the Yahoo Finance Python package to retrieve the historical price of the stock in the last 30 days."...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Not all System Designs are created equal! To make matters complicated, there are so many designs out there. As a former Principal Solutions Architect at AWS and Distinguished Cloud Architect at Verizon, I have taken over 300+ interviews, and I have seen three patterns coming over and over in interviews. In this newsletter edition, we will go through 3 System Design patterns that appear the MOST in cloud interviews and actual projects. If you nail these 3, you will be ahead of...
11 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Claude. ChatGPT. Gemini. Copilot. If you're not using at least one of these daily, you're the outlier. So here's the uncomfortable truth: walking into an interview and saying "I use Claude Code every day" is no longer impressive. It's table stakes. That's the average answer. And average doesn't get you hired. In today's edition, I'll show you what separates a forgettable Gen AI answer from one that makes the interviewer lean forward. The Average Answer (And Why It Fails) Here's...
14 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Recruiters reaching out to you for interviews. That's the dream, right? And one of the best ways to make that happen is a badge most cloud professionals have never heard of - the AWS Community Builder. I've had multiple students get accepted into this program recently. Recruiters started finding them on LinkedIn. Interview calls went up. And the best part? You don't need to be a Principal Architect or a 10x AWS certified rockstar to qualify. In today's newsletter, I'll show you...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, On March 31, 2026, one Anthropic engineer forgot to add a single line to a config file. That omission shipped a 59.8MB debug file alongside the Claude Code npm package, exposing 512,000 lines of TypeScript code across 1,900 files to the entire internet. Within hours, it was mirrored on GitHub and dissected by thousands of developers. Most coverage got lost in the drama of it. The real story is what the code reveals about how AI agent tools actually work, and where they are...
28 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, Almost every cloud and Gen AI interview right now includes this question. And almost every candidate gets it wrong. Not because they don't know Gen AI. But because they know too many terms and connect none of them. Let's fix that today. Question: What is an AI Agent? Common but average answer - "An agent can perform complex tasks without a prompt." Why is this average? It doesn't explain the superpower of an AI agent. It doesn't show how agents are different from a simple...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read