Hello!
Community Engineer at Pulumi, host of the CoRecursive podcast, conference speaker, and writer of widely-read guides on AWK, JQ, and infrastructure tools.
I’m Adam. I’m a software engineer at Pulumi, I host the CoRecursive podcast, and I speak at conferences when I have something worth saying. Based in Peterborough, Canada, working remotely since 2011.
The best way to reach me is email — adam@corecursive.com. I read them all, though I’m sometimes slow to respond.
If you’d rather lurk, I send a newsletter every few weeks with what I’m writing, recording, and reading. Signup form is at the bottom of every page.
Elsewhere: GitHub · LinkedIn · Bluesky · Twitter · CoRecursive.
Upcoming
talk Let's Build an Infrastructure-as-Code Tool from Scratch (upcoming)
Build a minimal IaC tool from scratch to demystify how Pulumi / Terraform / CDK actually work.
talk When AI Agents Touch Real Infrastructure (upcoming)
War stories from giving AI agents real infrastructure access — what broke, and the patterns that keep them safe.
Recent Podcasts
podcast The Bitter Lesson
I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it, but to understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper, reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. So we backed up through the history to find out how far "reward is enough" really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon program that taught itself, the Go move no human would have played. It's a story about machine learning, and what that leaves for the rest of us who still do it by hand.
podcast The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It
I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for months. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There's only one internet, and the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall. A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion. Don kept asking what, exactly, that $850 billion was buying. So he came over and we made an episode about it.
podcast The Aging Programmer
Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced programmers alive. She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept. But buried in the research was something harder to fix. The single factor that predicted whether you'd age well or badly had nothing to do with your body at all. The opponent isn't aging. The opponent is the story about aging.
Recent Writing
article Ten More Things You Can Do With Pulumi Neo
Ten more platform-engineering workflows you can hand to Pulumi Neo: deployments, tickets, incident triage, IAM, migration, and continuous ops.
article CDKTF is deprecated: What's next for your team?
The deprecation of CDKTF has left many without a clear path forward. This post presents the alternatives and shows what it's like to move from CDKTF to Pulumi.
article AWS built an integrated AI Agent training pipeline and they want you to rent it
At re:Invent 2025, AWS revealed a vertically integrated AI training pipeline. Here's who it's actually for.
Recent Talks
talk I Built an AI Running Coach (And Gave It Memory)
Adapting the AI running coach to use vector memory (Pinecone) for semantic recall over training history.
talk Workshop: Deploying AI Agents on AWS With Pulumi and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Hands-on workshop deploying AI agents on AWS with Pulumi and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
talk Building Action-Taking AI Agents: Reliability Lessons from Real Systems
Building AI agents that take real actions, and the reliability patterns that keep them safe.
Recent Videos
video Infrastructure as Code on AWS with TypeScript
In this hands-on workshop, learn how to use Pulumi to provision real AWS infrastructure with TypeScript. Adam walks through the building blocks — declarative resources, stacks, outputs — and ties them together by deploying a working multi-tier application: a database, a backend…
video How AI Agents Turned 5 Engineers Into 50
How does a small team ship custom code into customer cloud accounts in a day or two? Adam talks to Ewan Dawson, CTO of Compostable AI, about how they leaned into agentic AI for everything from product to infrastructure — and the rules they learned for building an "AI software…
video Using Earthly Lunar to enforce a new SDLC post-incident action item at scale
Short walkthrough of using Earthly Lunar to roll out an SDLC compliance check across a fleet — turning a post-incident action item into an enforceable policy.