Thoughts & Insights
Blog
Notes on cloud architecture, AWS migrations, payments work at Telered, and lessons from shipping production systems.
Bridging Issuers, BankCore, and IDEMIA: a Secure-Message Orchestrator That Stays Out of PCI-DSS Scope
Notes from building a Node.js + AWS orchestrator at Telered that brokers card-payment messages between issuing banks, our internal core, and a card-personalization vendor — without storing a single PAN. Plus a Java PaymentGateway that adapts the SVBankCore protocol on the back side.
Read ArticleRebuilding This Site in Public: 15 PRs, 10 Days, One Honest Portfolio
A practical log of how isaacvidal.dev went from a v0 template with fake testimonials to a real, AA-accessible portfolio with MDX content, a Resend contact backend, automated quality gates, and a maintenance switch — shipped in two weeks of evening work.
The AWS Architect Specialization Path: What I'm Learning, in Order
A working engineer's notes from the AWS Cloud Solutions Architect specialization — what each course actually teaches, what's worth your time, and what you can skim.
From Laravel Monolith to Cloud-Native: A Strangler-Fig Migration Playbook
Three years of shipping production systems on PHP/Laravel taught me what to keep, what to replace, and how to migrate to AWS without breaking the thing that's currently paying the bills.
Cryptographic Signing in the Browser: A Windows Companion App + WebSocket Bridge
How we let government-credentialed users sign legally-binding PDFs from a web app — by writing a Windows companion that bridges the browser to the smart card reader, the Windows Certificate Store, and the national government's cloud vault.