In mid-2025, I walked away from AWS.
After six years of comfortable employment at one of the world’s leading tech companies, I left. The comfort was precisely the problem. AI is reshaping how software gets built, and I had limited time to explore it deeply—to experiment, to go deep, to figure out what actually works versus what makes a good demo.
That decision wasn’t made lightly. I’ve spent 25 years shipping production software at startups, Nike, Lululemon, and AWS. My last role was lead architect in AWS’s GenAI innovation lab, building production systems with Bedrock and RAG before most developers had touched these tools. I wrote Clean Architecture with Python because I believe craft still matters, maybe more now than ever.
Now I research and write full-time. Altered Craft is my attempt to write the manual for what Andrej Karpathy called “a powerful alien tool handed out with no instructions.” Substance over hype. What actually works, documented through hands-on experiments.
Two ways to follow along:
→ Stay informed: Weekly roundup of AI tools, tutorials, and news that matter
→ Go deep: Technical explorations, career navigation, and community
I’m based in the Portland area, where I co-lead Portland AI Engineers (1000+ members). You can reach me at sam@alteredcraft.com or find me on LinkedIn.
