Brian Pfeil

Principal Cloud Architect at Merck · AWS Community Builder (Serverless)

Thirty years of building with technology and a few hundred cloud architecture reviews. Here is what I look for in a review, free courses I wrote while learning, and hands-on notes from the things I build.

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Architecture guides

Guides from hundreds of cloud architecture reviews

6 guides

The Architecture Review Checklist: 41 Questions I Ask 4 min read
How to Prepare for an Architecture Review 4 min read
The Compute Ladder: Serverless-First, Then Work Backwards 3 min read
Cloud Architecture Anti-Patterns (and What to Do Instead) 4 min read
Architecture Diagrams and Decision Records Reviewers Trust 4 min read
Guardrails and Paved Roads: Scaling Cloud Architecture Across Teams 3 min read

All guides

Courses

Free multi-lesson courses I wrote while learning each topic

12 courses

C++ Standard Library 13 lessons
mlx-lm 12 lessons
Web Authentication 12 lessons
Agentic Loop Engineering 11 lessons

All courses

Articles

Hand-written pieces on cloud architecture, serverless and building software

24 articles

All articles

Learn

Free courses and docs for code, cloud and AI, sorted by goal

105 free resources

Projects Small browser apps and games — all open source 13 projects Apps Little apps I've built and use, each with a short link 3 apps Lab notes Short notes from learning a tool or service by building with it, one per repo 291 notes AI Radar Models, tools and the people worth reading, refreshed every morning GitHub Every public repo, searchable, with learning paths through the playgrounds 413 repositories Résumé Where I've worked and what I've built there

Off the clock

Photos and video, favorite films, playlists and the channels I follow