https://blog.rickwaterman.com/Recent content on BlogHugoen-USSat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/macbooks-in-enterprise-it/Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/macbooks-in-enterprise-it/For engineering roles, MacBooks are a first-class enterprise endpoint — manageable through modern identity and MDM controls, supportable inside Microsoft-centered environments, and worth standardizing for secure, low-friction execution.https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/vercel-is-great-for-frontend-teams/Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/vercel-is-great-for-frontend-teams/Vercel’s developer experience is the best in the business, and for a frontend team without cloud depth it is the right call. But if your organization already has AWS CDK or Terraform specialization, you are paying a markup on Lambda and CloudFront for an abstraction you do not need, with spend controls that lag, private networking behind an Enterprise contract, and a self-hosting story that has finally caught up.https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/its-all-just-aws-under-the-hood/Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/its-all-just-aws-under-the-hood/Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, Heroku, Render, PlanetScale: open their region docs and you find AWS region codes. The platforms are thin layers over primitives you can learn directly. Deep AWS specialization — with real fluency in CDK and Terraform — is not narrowing. It is the thing that lets you use any of them, and leave any of them.https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/if-you-are-not-part-of-the-implementation/Tue, 14 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/if-you-are-not-part-of-the-implementation/An architect who does not ship code has no feedback loop, and an architecture with no feedback loop is a guess with a diagram. Own a real piece of the build — the hard module, the infrastructure as code, the review queue — or accept that the team will route around you.https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/boring-managed-services-win/Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/posts/boring-managed-services-win/Every queue, scheduler, or database you run yourself spends an innovation token on something your customers will never notice. Managed AWS services are boring in the best sense: their failure modes are documented, their metrics ship by default, and the toil they remove is the toil nobody measures.https://blog.rickwaterman.com/about/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://blog.rickwaterman.com/about/