Posts

Strobe Assistant Part 3—ACP+MCP Pipeline

How Strobe Assistant chains an ACP client, an agent service and an MCP server behind one ALB: why an...

Published: 08/10/2026

ai agents aws qut

Strobe Assistant Part 2—How AWS ECS Glues Tasks, ALBs, Target Groups, etc. Together

How ECS turns a container image into running Fargate tasks, how the ECS service keeps them alive, an...

Published: 07/10/2026

dev aws qut

Networking and VPC

Coming soon. VPCs, subnets and security groups, and how to let only the load balancer reach your con...

Published: 06/10/2026

aws qut

Strobe Assistant Part 1—AWS Target Groups and Application Load Balancer (ALB)

What an Application Load Balancer's listeners, rules and target groups each do, how health checks de...

Published: 06/10/2026

dev aws qut

Strobe Assistant—Extending Strobe with an AI Agent

How I extended Strobe, a photo-sharing app on AWS, with a conversational AI agent, an asynchronous p...

casestudy ai aws qut

Strobe Assistant Part 4—How Cognito and Auth Fit In

Coming soon. How Cognito ID tokens are verified at each trust boundary in Strobe Assistant.

Strobe Assistant Part 5—Embeddings for Posts, Moments and Search

Coming soon. What Strobe Assistant embeds for posts, moments and search, and where the vectors are s...

Strobe Assistant Part 6—Why Ingestion Goes Through SQS

Coming soon. Why Strobe Assistant's ingestion pipeline buffers work through an SQS queue.

Strobe Assistant Part 7—Dual Index, RRF and MRR

Coming soon. Why Strobe Assistant searches two vector indexes, merges them with RRF, and what it cos...

Migrating a Traditional Monolithic Backend to a Cloud-Native Serverless Microservices Architecture

How I moved Strobe, a photo-sharing app, from a single FastAPI monolith to API Gateway, Lambda, Cogn...

Published: 03/10/2026

casestudy dev security aws qut

From Points to Clouds — How VAEs Learn to Generate

How a variational autoencoder turns an autoencoder's scattered latent points into overlapping Gaussi...

Published: 30/09/2026

Four Things Called Username: An Email-vs-Username Login Bug in Amazon Cognito

A one-line login fix in Strobe's move to AWS, and why it was safe: one user had four different thing...

Published: 26/09/2026

dev security aws qut

Autoencoders from the Inside Out: What I Learned Building One on MNIST

A walkthrough of how autoencoders compress and reconstruct data through an encoder, bottleneck, and ...

Published: 25/09/2026

Receptive Fields in CNNs: Why Depth Beats Big Kernels

How the receptive field of a CNN neuron grows as you stack convolutional layers, why that's the real...

Published: 10/09/2026

CNN Fundamentals: Kernels, Convolution, and Feature Maps

A from-scratch walkthrough of how convolutional layers actually compute their output — kernels vs. f...

Published: 08/09/2026

Designing the System, Not the Screen: A Shift from Assets to Infrastructure

AI has made producing design assets trivial. What it hasn't touched is the harder, more valuable hal...

Published: 03/09/2026

design ai uiux process

First Impressions: How Claude, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode Handle the Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction

A close read of Claude, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode's onboarding against Microsoft's evidence-based ...

Published: 31/08/2026

design ai uiux

Understanding the ROC Curve

The ROC curve's name is a WWII radar relic, and its \"random guessing\" diagonal is trickier than it...

Published: 28/08/2026

ai machine-learning

AI+Sec

Deterministic Attack-to-Alert Mapping with Correlation IDs

Timestamp-proximity matching between attack ground truth and Wazuh alerts wasn't reliable enough for...

Published: 25/08/2026

security dev evals

AI+Sec

Understanding the Log Types in a Wazuh + Claude Security Pipeline

A field guide to the five log types flowing through my IFN737 research pipeline — from raw attack ex...

Published: 23/08/2026

security ai dev evals

Revamping My Personal Website With Claude Design + Claude Code

I used Claude Design to generate a new design system for this site and Claude Code to implement it w...

Published: 01/07/2026

design ai casestudy process

Regularisation in Neural Networks

Working through Karpathy's makemore series made me realise I'd never truly understood regularisation...

Published: 30/06/2026

ai machine-learning

AI's Productivity Gains Aren't Evenly Shared. I'm a Designer, and Here's My Experience

There's a pattern showing up across industries that nobody talks about enough: the people who gain t...

Published: 09/05/2026

ai design casestudy

From Requirements to Assumptions: A Better Way to Build Products

Imagine this: as a UI/UX designer, you spend a month gathering stakeholder input, mapping the proble...

Published: 23/04/2026

design strategy

Designing for Visibility: Adaptive Input Fields in LingoBun

Exploring the impact of adaptive input fields on user experience in LingoBun, emphasizing the import...

Published: 08/03/2026

design uiux casestudy

LingoBun: Hardening an AI Language-Learning Product for Production

An LLM-powered vocabulary app taken past the demo stage: Redis-backed rate limiting and cost caps on...

Published: 15/02/2026

design casestudy uiux ai llm

LingoBun Logo: A Case Study on Logo Design in the Era of AI

LingoBun is deliberately calm, focused, and serious about learning. Without a logo that reflected th...

Published: 31/01/2026

design casestudy ai process

Multimodal Context for Higher Retention: A Case Study

This article explores the implementation of media upload and notes features in LingoBun, driven by u...

Published: 26/01/2026

casestudy dev

Non-blocking AI Validation User Flow: A Case Study

Exploring the transition from a blocking to a non-blocking validation flow in LingoBun's AI-powered ...

Published: 23/01/2026

ai casestudy design

Prototyping Made Easy: How Emerging Tooling Has Transformed the UI Design Workflow

When I began my career as a designer nearly 15 years ago, prototyping was hard: not because good ide...

Published: 20/01/2026

design uiux ai

LingoBun: Learning Language, Seriously

Language learning has never lacked tools. Over the years, I've tried various apps that promise faste...

Published: 11/01/2026

web dev

Vibe Coding as a Supercharged Learning Experience

Vibe coding is often described as a way for non-software-engineers to build digital products by lean...

Published: 06/01/2026

ai dev process

AuStride

AuStride: Striding Towards an Active Future

Walking or riding rather than driving offers the two-fold benefit of increasing mental and physical ...

Published: 17/11/2025

design casestudy uiux

Understanding R-Squared as a Measure of Model Fit

R-squared is a metric that measures how much of the variance in the actual data is captured by a mod...

Published: 20/08/2025

ai machine-learning

Github Actions & EC2 Deployment: Troubleshooting Guide

When working on Assignment 1 of the Software Life Cycle Management unit, we ran into several technic...

Published: 17/08/2025

dev git

Common Asymmetric Algorithms (Part 2): ECC

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is an asymmetric cryptographic algorithm that is gaining popularit...

Published: 14/07/2025

security

Common Asymmetric Algorithms (Part 1): RSA

Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) is one of the most well-known algorithms for asymmetric cryptography. It...

Published: 11/07/2025

security

Symmetric vs. Asymmetric Cryptography

Cryptography is the foundation of digital security—from protecting your messages and passwords to se...

Published: 10/07/2025

security

Designing Password UIs That Enhance Security and Usability

Many sign-up forms still use a password UI pattern that may seem secure at first glance, but is prob...

Published: 08/07/2025

design uiux security

Passkeys: Demystified

Passkeys are gaining popularity, but what exactly is a passkey? How is it different from a password?...

Published: 22/06/2025

qut security

Representing Negative Binary Numbers

A common challenge when handling binaries is how to represent signed numbers in a way that is both m...

Published: 17/06/2025

qut

Number Systems 2: Bases and Conversions in Modern Systems

Modern position-dependent number systems are built on the concept of bases. A base defines how many ...

Published: 03/06/2025

dev

Number Systems 1: Position-Independent vs Position-Dependent

The same number can be represented in different ways using different number systems.

Published: 31/05/2025

dev

Understanding JWTs: Part 2

A common feature in web development is closing a popup or menu when the user clicks outside of it.

Published: 16/03/2025

web dev

Understanding JWTs: Part 1

JWTs offer several advantages over traditional authentication methods like cookies, making them a po...

Published: 12/03/2025

web dev

How to Reorder and Squash Commits with Git

When working with multiple WIP commits or other related commits, you may want to combine them to kee...

Published: 27/02/2025

dev git

Multifunctional AI Assistant (Part 3)

AI assistant that can help with a range of tasks.

Published: 24/10/2024

Multifunctional AI Assistant (Part 2)

AI assistant that can help with a range of tasks.

Published: 08/10/2024

Multifunctional AI Assistant (Part 1)

AI assistant that can help with a range of tasks.

Published: 25/09/2024

AI-Powered English Speaking Tutor For Learners

Near-real-time English chat with instant feedback.

Published: 20/08/2024

An AI-Powered App That Streamlines Your Speaking Test Prep Workflow

Traditional English speaking test prep methods felt inefficient, and the process of recording my ans...

Published: 27/07/2024