Edd Mann

Ep. 3: Serverless PHP w/ @mnapoli.bsky.social is live! ☁️🐘

We talk Bref's evolution and the launch of Bref Cloud:
🏗️ PHP on AWS Lambda
🔌 Laravel & Symfony integration
⚖️ Serverless vs Kubernetes
🧰 DX & platform design
🌱 Open source & sustainability

🎧 compiledconversations.com/3/

Ep. 2: Thinking in Events (Part 2) w/ @jameseastham.co.uk is live! 🎧

We move from theory to practice in event-driven architecture:
🔁 Choreography vs orchestration
🧩 Handling failure
🔍 Observability w/ OpenTelemetry
🔐 Event security & PII
⚙️ Migrating from monoliths

🎙️ compiledconversations.com/2/

After years of wanting to, I’ve launched Compiled Conversations!

Ep. 1: Thinking in Events (Part 1) w/ @jameseastham.co.uk
💬 Event-driven architecture
🧠 Communication-first systems
🍕 Pizza metaphors & real-world insight

Huge thanks to James!
Part 2 drops next week.

🎧 compiledconversations.com/1/

Just finished my first PCB design - a prototype electronic chessboard using an ESP32-S3, hall sensors, and WS2812 (NeoPixel) LEDs ♟️💡

From idea to hardware, here's what I learned along the way:
🔗 eddmann.com/posts/my-fir...

#PCB #ESP32 #KiCad #Electronics #Chess

The PCB looks to be working as designed 🎉 Next up: test display options before building the full chessboard ♟️

My first #PCB has just been delivered - fingers crossed it's not just an expensive coaster 🤞

Last year, inspired by Monolith to Microservices by Sam Newman, I explored how to build a choreographed, event-driven workflow using AWS EventBridge, SQS, and Lambda - diving into idempotency, observability, and event design in practice.

Full deep dive 🧵 eddmann.com/posts/buildi...

Just wrapped up an epic 2-hour podcast recording with @jameseastham.co.uk diving deep into all things Event-Driven Architecture. Grateful for the time and insights - can’t wait to get this one edited and out there. Thanks again, James! 🎙️⚡️

Just ordered my first custom-designed #PCB for an electronic chessboard ♟️ idea I’ve been prototyping. Can't wait to see how it turns out! Worst case, they’ll make great coasters 😂

Huge thanks to Richard (www.traintrackr.co.uk) 🙌 for all the help!

Looking back at one of my favourite side quests:

Built a custom AWS Lambda runtime for my own language, santa-lang 🧑‍🎄, designed to solve Advent of Code puzzles.
The interpreter and runtime bindings written in Rust 🦀

🔗 eddmann.com/posts/rewrit...
💻 github.com/eddmann/sant...

🚀 Want reliable, atomic event publishing in your serverless apps?

In this post, I explore two practical implementations of the Transactional Outbox pattern using AWS (DynamoDB Streams, EventBridge, Fargate).

👉 Dive in: eddmann.com/posts/server...

#serverless #AWS #microservices #SOA #EDA

Humidity really throws a spanner in the works when it comes to planned runs — had that delight this morning too 😬 Hoping next week isn’t as hot and humid as forecast 🤞

Yea I know what you mean, it feels more like beating your body into the ground as opposed to pushing your limits 😂, like you say though - never say never.

Character building indeed! hope you had a good run and the weather held for you 🤞

I recently wrote about a 3hr ‘vibe coding’ session where I prototyped an initial Chess UI for a #ESP32 side project I’m working on. There’s a lot of hype in this space,but no denying how powerful the tooling is becoming—even in its infancy. It’s only going to get better.

eddmann.com/posts/vibe-c...

Wow, I just had a look—those really do look incredible! Hitting 50 is seriously impressive mileage 🤯. My 38-miler completely wrecked me, haha. Another wild idea I came across is the “10 in 10” challenge—10 marathons or ultras in 10 days. Totally nuts! 😂 Got a long run planned for this weekend?

One of the features I really enjoyed building for MyPodcast was the browser extension - the WebExtensions API is a solid tool for developing across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, it *mostly* just worked out of the box! 🔥 🧩

Totally get that! I’ve been watching a lot of trail running YouTubers lately — it looks amazing 🏞️🏃‍♂️. What ultras have you done before?

Wow ultra's are another level 💪, I've done one 38 miler event and it was a whole different experience to HM, Marathon running. I would love to do a 100k event someday in the future, emphasis is definitely on someday 😂

Nice! The past few days have been tough for getting runs in, even early in the morning. Are you training for something in particular?

My CSS knowledge was a decade out of date.
So I decided to rebuild my blog with modern #CSS, a #BEM + utility hybrid (thanks @kevinpowell.co), and moved from Jekyll to #Hugo. No frameworks, no preprocessors; just semantic HTML & hand-rolled styles.

Here's what I learned:
eddmann.com/posts/how-re...

Just launched MyPodcast 🎉

It turns your saved articles into a personal podcast feed. Built in my free time over the past 3 weeks — had a lot of fun & learned a ton!

🌐 mypodcast.cloud
🚀 www.producthunt.com/products/myp...

Built with @laravel.com, #Bref & #Serverless ❤️

@jameseastham.co.uk Hey, big fan of your YouTube channel. I previously hosted a podcast threedevsandamaybe.com and am looking to start podcasting again. I was wondering if you would be at all interested to come on as a guest to discuss all things EDA, Serverless, Plant Based Pizza's & Rust?

YouTube video by Andrej Karpathy Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

Couldn't agree more! His deep dive into LLM's from several months back (although several hours) has so much well considered and explained content on the concepts I highly recommend that too if you have not already checked it out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTG...

There’s a long way to go with this project, but having a running prototype—built with a lib I’d never touched before—is super fulfilling.
Fast feedback + working UI = exciting early validation for the concept.

4. Flashing to the ESP32 was manual this time.
Hoping to add `cursorrules` soon to automate build + upload each prompt cycle. Small thing, but toil like this adds up fast when you’re iterating frequently. Plus I want Cursor to feed compilation errors back to the model.

3. The model fixated on changing an en passant variable (from_r → from_row)—even after I rejected the edits and left comments.
I had to manually rewrite the line to get it to move on. The only bit of “real” coding I did, just to nudge it forward. Does this still count as "vibe coding" now...

2. I stuck with LVGL 8 after a quick try at porting to v9.
In ~10 mins it became clear there were too many breaking changes. With more time I could break it down further for the model, but for this sprint, 8 did the job just fine.

Some takeaways from the session:

1. Even with Cursor’s checkpoints, I made frequent commits to avoid losing progress, maybe over time I'll learn to trust Cursor checkpoints more.

...

Just finished my first ever “vibe coding” session: in 3 hrs with #Cursor, #PlatformIO & #ESP32 #CYD, I prototyped an #LVGL based chessboard UI that hooks into the existing Chessmate API. The REPL is very satisfying and somewhat addictive—great to see it working with a lib I’d never touched before.

Saw this awesome post on Image Style Prompts for #ChatGPT (x.com/bruffstar/st...) and got inspired to add a little avatar easter egg to my blog this morning. A few results still need tweaking, but I'm really liking the overall effect!