Blog
AWS NAT Gateways Are Robbing You 💀💸
10 October 2025 | Brandon Barker
If you've ever looked at your AWS bill and winced at the NAT Gateway charges, you're not alone. While NAT Gateways are essential for allowing private subnet resources to access the internet, their cost can quickly spiral out of control, especially in multi-region or high-throughput environments. What if there was a modern, cost-effective alternative that could slash your NAT costs by up to 90% without sacrificing functionality? Enter fck-nat – a (f)easible (c)ost (k)onfigurable NAT solution that challenges the existing NAT Gateway pricing model
Mechanical Rock Joins AWS ISV Accelerate Program with Snowvault Data Platform
24 September 2025 | Tania Broome Miller-Jones
Mechanical Rock, Australia's leading cloud native practice and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, today announced its entry into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) program with its flagship product, Snowvault.
One Simple Trick to Better Types
17 September 2025 | Brandon Barker
When building APIs, it's easy to create types that look fine at first glance but can actually allow impossible or contradictory states. Thinking of types as sets of values provides a simple way to reason about all possible states a type can hold, known as its cardinality. By reducing unnecessary states and using discriminated unions instead of multiple boolean flags, you can create types that are precise, safe, and clear-preventing bugs and making your code easier to understand and maintain.
Running dbt projects on Snowflake
2 July 2025 | Maciej Tarsa
Discover how to run dbt projects natively on Snowflake using the new Workspaces feature and Git integration. This post explores the benefits, setup process, and current limitations of running dbt directly within Snowflake, including key considerations for teams migrating from other orchestration tools. With dbt Fusion and evolving platform features, now is the perfect time to experiment and prepare for the future of analytics engineering on Snowflake.
Solving Global Latency With PostgreSQL Logical Replication
8 May 2025 | Quintin Maseyk
As our application gained global traction, performance for users outside Australia began to suffer especially at the database layer. In this post, I share how we solved the challenge by leveraging PostgreSQL Logical Replication to reduce latency for international regions while maintaining a central source of truth. I’ll walk through our decision-making process, implementation steps, and the lessons we learned scaling a global architecture.
16 April 2025 | Maciej Tarsa
Tried and tested methods to reduce your Snowflake spending
Speak & It Shall Be Done: Building a Voice Assistant That Actually Works
26 March 2025 | Jesse Millman
A deep dive on setting up Voice Enabled AI workflows with Eleven Labs, n8n, and OpenAI.
How Databricks Apps Are Changing Our Relationship With Information
12 March 2025 | Jesse Millman
This blog post explores the shift from dashboards to interactive applications in the Databricks ecosystem, using a LinkedIn content optimization app as a concrete example of how these new tools transform business workflows and create value.
Chrome-ing to Success: Automate CI/CD for Web Extensions
6 March 2025 | Tui Warihana
Web extension development comes with its own set of challenges—ambiguous documentation, browser quirks, and the risk of deployment headaches. A solid CI/CD pipeline can take the guesswork out of releases, ensuring smooth updates and secure hosting. In this guide, I’ll walk you through automating the process so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time building.
Securing Load Balancers: A Tale of Two CloudFront Approaches
10 February 2025 | Jesse Millman
As web applications grow in complexity, securing communication between CloudFront and origin servers remains a critical concern. Today, we explore two approaches to this challenge: custom header validation vs Amazon's newly announced CloudFront VPC origins feature. We'll see how this new approach dramatically simplifies origin security while improving your infrastructure's security posture.