shearn89.com

Welcome to my blog. Here is where I write out about anything I feel like, be it tech stuff I’ve worked on, problems I’ve solved, good beer I’ve drunk… Anything at all!

Agentic Engineering So Far

Alex Shearn published on 2026-04-24 included in Technical

Recently I’ve been doing a lot more work with AI agents in my day to day work, so this post is a bit of a rambling write-up of where I’ve got to. Some semi-useful learnings that others may benefit from! I was pretty skeptical at first. My view was that AI coding tools were smart autocomplete - handy for boilerplate, better at filling in parameters in terraform than the built in autocomplete, unit test population, not much else.

AWS KMS Alias Based Policies

Alex Shearn published on 2024-05-23 included in Technical

I recently implemented some stuff that set up KMS keys for each application being deployed to a k8s cluster, for use with SOPS. Turns out, aliases are not as trivial to use in policies as you might expect!

Go Lambdas on Graviton

Alex Shearn published on 2022-01-11

I recently had a quick look at how to get Golang Lambdas running on ARM - specifically AWS’ Graviton2 processors.

Docker on CodeBuild

Alex Shearn published on 2022-01-10 included in Howto

I’ve recently been playing with building some containers for use in CodeBuild. Here’s what I learned.

Migration to Hugo

Alex Shearn published on 2022-01-05 included in Technical

I decided to update the blog, only to discover that Jekyll is now quite old, the framework around it that I used is not maintained, and generally could do with a change.

NiFi Autojoining

Alex Shearn published on 2021-09-15 included in Technical

Recently I’ve been building an Apache NiFi cluster in the cloud. I was looking into how I can configure NiFi to automatically add new nodes to it’s cluster, based on using the Node Group property that’s available within NiFi’s authorizers.xml configuration file.