Davide de Paolis articles - 196 total
Setting Up Kiro for Your AI-Native SDLC
A practical guide to setting up Kiro for an AI-native SDLC. Learn how prompts, steering files, MCP servers, agents, hooks, and powers work together to save time, reduce cognitive load, and stay technical even when you’re coding between meetings.
I Didn’t Get MCP Until I Built One
A hands-on learning note on MCP servers—how they work, why they matter, and how building one turned confusion into clarity.
No Time to Code: AI as Leverage for Engineering Leadership
Stepping up in engineering leadership often means less time to code and more responsibility for decisions, alignment, and outcomes. This post explores how an AI-native SDLC can become real leverage for EMs and Staff+ engineers—helping reduce toil, accelerate learning, and amplify impact even when building time is scarce.
Road To Compliance: Will Your Internal Users Hate Your Platform Team?
Platform teams don't have to be "the cloud police." Learn how we built a serverless compliance solution using AWS Security Hub, SCPs, Config, and EventBridge that informs teams before enforcing rules—transforming resistance into collaboration.
The Culture Map: Book review and reflections from an EM Leading International Teams
Reflections from an Engineering Manager on cultural differences, feedback, meetings, and leading international teams — inspired by The Culture Map.
Vibecoding in Between Meetings: Learning MCP Servers and Building a PoC ( with AWS Kiro)
building a PoC for an MCP server using AI extensively triggered me to create a series of blog post and a conference talk
My 2025 Year in Review - Conferences, Community, and Growth as an AWS Community Builder and Leader
a reflection and retrospective of my year 2025 as community builder, blogger and public speaker
From Nagging to Holding People Accountable
A personal and practical reflection on Crucial Accountability by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler — exploring how to hold others accountable with skill, empathy, and clarity while strengthening relationships at work and beyond.
Am I doing the best I can? Thoughts about talent, mediocrity, expectations and success.
A personal journey about balancing potential, joy, constraints, and redefining what excellence truly means.
Serverless vs Kubernetes: The Final Showdown - Why we decided to hold this talk and where to go from here
reflections on the debate Serverless vs Kubernetes and the talk that we brought at several conferences this year.
Know your tendencies - Questioning yourself (and others)- The 4 Tendencies Framework
A reflection on Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies framework, exploring how the “Questioner” mindset shapes logic-driven decision-making, leadership growth, and self-acceptance while balancing curiosity, discipline, and the will to improve.
Reflections from InfoQ Munich 2025 -Platforms, People, and the Path to Sovereignty
Key takeaways and reflections from InfoQ Munich 2025 — insights on platform engineering, observability, AI, and the evolving balance between technology, culture, and sovereignty.
Discomfort isn’t the enemy: Lessons from 3 times I cried at work
A personal reflection on discomfort, growth, and leadership, how vulnerability and trust turn imposter moments into opportunities to evolve.
🌊 Be the Rising Tide: The Multiplying Effect of Lifting (and Pushing) Others
Thoughts on leadership style, leadership challenges, a comparison with coding and climbing, some reading suggestions
Easy way to configure your kubeconfig and to debug your your EKS Cluster
tips and tricks to easily configure kubectl and debug kubernetes cluster with ease (via UI plugin or via Terminal)
The easiest way to set up and configure your AWS CLI
step by step guide to configure your aws cli
Clean up S3 with Batch Operations, Tags and Lifecycle policies, they said. It will be cheaper, they said.
a learning opportunity for a developer and a saving opportunity for the company turned into quite a surprise, a little less savings than expected but definitely much more learning!
My 2024 (and 3rd year) as an AWS Community Builder
a year in and for the community
I failed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam, so what?!
I attempted the solutions architect exam without preparation and this is how it went! some tips and useful links to prepare for it.
my 2023 in review: sad, mad, sad, glad, glad, glad 😓😤🥳!
2023 was not easy, went through some struggles nevertheless made some great achievements and the last quarter was mindblowing.
I have read it so you don't have to - Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by R.T. Kiyosaki
I love reading and love exposing myself to different perspectives and points of view. I was skeptical about this book and forced myself to read it all. I was not wrong, it was a waste of money and time: the only valuable information could fill 2 pages, and the rest is boring repetition, success bias, and privilege.
Bragging like a STAR ⭐️! Boost your confidence and be more convincing during salary negotiations and job interviews.
Increase your chances of getting that job or raise with a brag book and the S.T.A.R method
playing around with PartyRock! a new Bedrock playground
AWS just launched PartyRock, a tool to experiment with Bedrock and build AI powered apps. check out how easy it is and what app I created in minutes.
I spoke at AWS Community Day in Munich: how I prepared and how it went.
at the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of speaking at a conference. After a bunch of refusals, my talk was accepted. If you are interested in public speaking and tech talks in this post you might find some useful tips about my journey into the preparation and delivery of my presentation.
There is no right or wrong, as long as it works - Actually, how you use DynamoDB makes a lot of difference!
let's have a look at how a proof of concept pushed to production went bad and how we can improve the performances of a backend querying multiple DynamoDB tables while at the same time reducing costs
Be the rising tide - grow as a leader or engineer by helping others
the real multiplying factor in team performance is sharing passion and knowledge and enabling/empowering others. become like a rising tide to lift others achieving our common goals.
Understanding the desiredCount and autoscaling behaviour of AWS Fargate - Fuckups 🤦♂️ and learnings 🤓
mistake can be learning opportunity ( given a work environment without blame culture) - sharing failures helps the community and consolidates those learnings. Today I will share one incidents that involved autoscaling configuration of AWS Fargate
Fixing Error spawnSync bash ENOENT occurring during CDK Lambda Bundling on CI pipeline
a nasty error occurring only on gitlab runner slowed down my deployment, in this post I am sharing the solution
Software Engineering is about trade-offs: make sure you have options! (architecture patterns comparison)
check 3 possible solutions
My first 6 months as AWS Community Builder: boosting my career and fighting Imposter Syndrome!
Becoming an AWS Community Builder is a great boost for your career, thanks to endless learning and networking opportunities. Let's see in detail why.