Aaron VanSledright

Category: Random

  • 2025 Wrapped: AI Agents, Fantasy Football, and 31 Posts Later

    It’s that time of year again where we all pretend to be surprised by our Spotify Wrapped stats even though we knew we listened to that one song 847 times (it was a Taylor Swift song). Well, I figured why not do the same thing for my blog? So grab your coffee (or bourbon, no judgment (unless its bad bourbon)), and let’s dive into what went down on this blog in 2025.

    The Numbers Don’t Lie

    31 posts. Thirty. One. Posts.

    That’s more than double my 2024 output. I went from a “once-a-month-maybe” blogger to someone who apparently had a lot to say. We’re talking about ~12,753 words of technical content, Python scripts, AI experiments, and weekly fantasy football updates that probably should have their own newsletter at this point.

    If you averaged it out, that’s a new post every 11.7 days. Not bad for someone who also has a full-time job, is launching a SaaS product, and is apparently trying to train an AI to beat his friends at fantasy football.

    The Monthly Breakdown

    Here’s how 2025 shaped up:

    • September: 7 posts (my absolute peak – more on this later)
    • December: 6 posts (strong finish!)
    • October & November: 5 posts each (keeping the momentum)
    • February: 3 posts (infrastructure month)
    • January & August: 2 posts each
    • July: 1 lonely post (I was probably on vacation)

    September was wild. Like, “did Aaron even sleep that month?” wild. Seven posts. SEVEN. And if you’re wondering why, well…

    The Fantasy Football Chronicles

    Let’s address the elephant in the room: 21 out of 31 posts were about Fantasy Football and AI.

    Yes. You read that right. Two-thirds of my 2025 content was me documenting my journey to see if an AI could beat humans at fantasy football. Was it an obsession? Maybe. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

    Starting with “An AI Fantasy Football Draft Assistant” in August, I embarked on what became a 17-week experiment combining AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Claude, and way too much time analyzing NFL matchups. Week after week, I documented the AI’s decisions, the wins, the losses, and that one time Josh Jacobs was questionable and the Packers just… didn’t play him. (FTP go Lions)

    The Results? We made the playoffs. Finished 4th place. Beat half the league. The AI teammate actually worked.

    Will I do it again in 2026? You bet your AWS bill I will. But next time, we’re building a custom model and adding proper injury management. Because if there’s one thing 2025 taught me, it’s that you can teach an AI to predict football games, but you can’t teach NFL coaches to not make questionable lineup decisions.

    AI Was Everywhere (As It Should Be)

    Fantasy football wasn’t the only place AI showed up. Out of 31 posts, 28 touched on AI or automation in some way:

    The through line? Making AI actually useful instead of just flashy. I’m not here to build chatbots that tell you the weather. I’m here to build agents that save you money, reduce your troubleshooting time, and maybe win you a fantasy football championship.

    The Infrastructure Deep Dive

    When I wasn’t playing fantasy football GM with AI, I was deep in the AWS and Terraform trenches:

    Python and Terraform remained my bread and butter, which makes sense when you’re trying to automate literally everything.

    Fun Stats You Didn’t Ask For

    What 2025 Taught Me

    1. Ship it: I launched products, wrote code, documented everything. Perfection is the enemy of done.
    2. AI is a teammate, not a replacement: The best use cases combine AI capabilities with human expertise.
    3. Document the journey: The weekly fantasy football posts weren’t just about results – they were about learning in public.
    4. Infrastructure matters: Whether it’s Terraform, AWS, or your blog’s export tool, good infrastructure saves you hours.

    Looking Ahead to 2026

    I’m not slowing down. Here’s what’s coming:

    • CloudWatch AI Agent: Just launched on December 30th. This is going to help so many teams reduce their troubleshooting time.
    • Fantasy Football 2.0: Custom model training, better injury management, live NFL standings integration. We’re going deeper.
    • More open source tools: If I built it and it’s useful, I’m sharing it.
    • Consistent content: Keeping this momentum going. More tutorials, more projects, more real-world solutions.

    Thank You

    To everyone who read these posts, tested my tools, provided feedback, or just silently judged my fantasy football lineup decisions from afar – thank you. This blog exists because people actually find value in what I’m building and sharing.

    Special shout out to everyone who:

    • Tested drawiototerraform.com
    • Used my GitHub repos
    • Sent me messages about projects
    • Challenged my AI’s fantasy football decisions

    The Actual Spotify Wrapped Numbers

    Oh right, this was supposed to be like Spotify Wrapped. Here you go:

    🎵 Top Artist: AWS (it’s not music but it might as well be)
    📊 Minutes Listened: ~12,753 words = roughly 64 minutes of reading content
    🎯 Top Genre: “Infrastructure as Code with a side of Fantasy Sports”
    🏆 Your 2025 Achievement: Wrote more than 3x your 2024 output
    🔮 2026 Prediction: You’ll write about AI doing something weird again

    Oh, and I tried to ride 6000 miles on my bike in 2025. Because apparently I don’t have enough hobbies.

    Here’s to 2025. Here’s to shipping code. Here’s to AI teammates. Here’s to 31 posts and counting.

    See you in 2026. Let’s build some cool stuff.

    – Aaron

    P.S. – If you made it this far, you’re either really bored or you actually like my content. Either way, appreciate you. Drop a comment, send me a message, or just keep reading. I’ll keep writing.

    P.P.S. – Yes, the AI finished 4th in fantasy football. No, I’m not salty about it. Okay, maybe a little.

  • Fantasy Football and AI – Week 14

    Happy Wednesday. Victory Wednesday that is! Our AI selected correctly this week and we snuck in a tough win that was finalized on Sunday night.

    Unfortunately, we lost Zach Ertz on the way. A really nasty low hit took him out for the year. Here is the final scores for our lineup:

    Josh Allen came up huge for us. Breece Hall was useless and the Commanders defense might as well have never stepped out on the field. But, a win is a win! We are now in a 3 way tie for first place but will likely take the third seed into the playoffs given our total fantasy points.

    Here is the lineup for week 15: We’ve had to make some changes from waivers and I’m hoping the AI selected correctly. We are heading into the part of the season where teams are going to be fighting for playoff spots. I hope that it is taking that into account as it made the waiver picks.

    We have some highly projected players this week. What do you think? Will we be able to pull off another win this week?

  • Setting Up Bambu Studio in Ubuntu 24

    I like 3D printing. I recently started dual booting Windows and Linux again. As I was setting up my new Ubuntu installation I remembered that I needed a slicer for my 3D printing.

    Thankfully, Bambu Studio has a Linux application that I can utilize. I downloaded the 2.3.1 release for my setup. It runs, it sees my printer, it slices and it sends to my printer to print.

    BUT!

    I need a little more. Here is a quick guide of how to set up Bambu Studio and create file affiliations in Ubuntu.

    # Create an application directory and make the file executable

mkdir ~/Applications
mv <yourApp>.appimage ~/Applications
cd mkdir ~/Applications
chmod +x <yourApp>.appimage

# You can now launch the app. Lets make some file associations

touch ~/.local/share/applications/your-app.desktop

# add the following to the above file. Edit as needed
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Your App Name
Exec=/home/yourusername/Applications/your-app.AppImage %f
Icon=/path/to/icon.png
Type=Application
Categories=Graphics;3DGraphics;
MimeType=model/3mf;application/x-3mf;

# Update things:
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/

# Create the associations
xdg-mime default your-app.desktop model/3mf
xdg-mime default your-app.desktop application/x-3mf

    This should now launch Bambu Studio or your other application when you try and open a 3MF file!

  • Fantasy Football and AI – Week 13

    Sigh… another week another loss. It was a close one. It turns out people just didn’t really show up to play.

    Its hard to win a game when your high scorer is a defense. There was some light at the end of the Patriots game when Henderson was running down the field. Unfortunately they took him out and then the drive stalled. Had he been able to get a touch down we could have won. We left some points on the bench as well:

    Zach Ertz had a monster game and many of the other players would have been better than Saquon.

    On to week 14. This is the last week before our playoff run. Here is the current proposed roster:

    Its hard to not start Saquon Barkley. But he’s trending down and I think I agree with the AI here in not selecting him. Marvin Harrison Jr. is questionable again due to his surgery but is expected to play. We grabbed Christian Watson, Marcus Mariota and the Commanders defense for week 14. We dropped J.J. McCarthy due to poor performance and injury. Henderson is on bye this week. Our current bench looks like this:

    What do you think? Do you agree with the AI’s selections for the week?

  • Fantasy Football and AI – Week 6

    We’re back with the week 6 AI managed fantasy football team and we got another win! The team’s record is now 4-2-0 and sits 3rd in the league.

    Here is the final lineup that was fielded for week 6 and the points

    There were a couple players on the bench that did better. Keenan Allen and Breece Hall could have been swapped for pretty much anyone on the bench and we would have had a few more points. A win is a win. One thing to note is that we had a game time injury of Dalton Kincaid and I had to pull Zach Ertz in at the last minute to avoid getting a zero.

    For week 7 we are starting to see both injury and bye weeks happening. The AI will have to make some pretty deep roster moves in order to fill the gaps. Here is the initial starting lineup:

    Because of the BYE weeks we are picking up Aaron Rodgers who put up a good game against Cincinnati last night. DK did not have a great night last night. We picked up the Patriots defense as well as Eddy Pineiro to fill in some slots. I think the Patriots against Tennessee will be an interesting matchup given that the Titans fired their head coach. Mike Vrabel has the Patriots firing again and hopefully he can shut them out and we can put up some big points!

    From a tech perspective, I’m slowly putting together an MCP server to help create some efficiencies when working with the DynamoDB tables. Hopefully, if we can handle that, the overall application response time will be faster. If I wasn’t traveling AGAIN this weekend I would have made it a hackathon. Hopefully for week 8!

    Subscribe for updates.

  • 2024 Year in Review: A Journey Through Code and Creation

    As another year wraps up, I wanted to take a moment to look back at what I’ve shared and built throughout 2024. While I might not have posted as frequently as in some previous years (like 2020’s 15 posts!), each post this year represents a significant technical exploration or project that I’m proud to have shared.

    The Numbers

    This year, I published 9 posts, maintaining a steady rhythm of about one post per month. April was my most productive month with 2 posts, and I managed to keep the blog active across eight different months of the year. Looking at the topics, I’ve written quite a bit about Python, Lambda functions, and building various tools and automation solutions. Security and Discord-related projects also featured prominently in my technical adventures.

    Highlights and Major Projects

    Looking back at my posts, a few major themes emerged:

    1. File Processing and Automation: I spent considerable time working with file processing systems, creating efficient workflows and sharing my experiences with different approaches to handling data at scale.
    2. Python Development: From Lambda functions to local tooling, Python remained a core focus of my technical work this year. I’ve shared both successes and challenges, including that Thanksgiving holiday project that consumed way more time than expected (but was totally worth it!).
    3. Security and Best Practices: Throughout the year, I maintained a strong focus on security considerations in development, sharing insights and implementations that prioritize robust security practices.

    Community and Testing

    One consistent theme in my posts has been the value of community feedback and testing. I’ve actively sought input on various projects, from interface design to data processing implementations. This collaborative approach has led to more robust solutions and better outcomes.

    Looking Forward to 2025

    As we head into 2025, I’m excited to increase my posting frequency while continuing to share technical insights, project experiences, and practical solutions to real-world development challenges. There are already several projects in the pipeline that I can’t wait to write about. I also hope to ride 6000 miles on my bike throughout Chicago this year.

    For those interested my most popular Github repositories were:

    • bedrock-poc-public
    • count-s3-objects
    • delete-lambda-versions
    • dynamo-user-manager
    • genai-photo-processor
    • lex-bot-local-tester
    • presigned-url-gateway
    • s3-object-re-encryption

    Thank You

    To everyone who’s read, commented, tested, or contributed to any of the projects I’ve written about this year – thank you. Your engagement and feedback have made these posts and projects better. While this year saw fewer posts than some previous years, each one represented a significant project or learning experience that I hope provided value to readers.

    Here’s to another year of coding, learning, and sharing!

  • Working From Home Tips

    I’ve been working from home for some time now and have gotten into a pretty good routine that keeps me sane, healthy and happy.

    1. Create a schedule. You need to have a routine that you stick to starting with waking up at a decent time. You don’t have to commute to an office which is nice but you should still plan on waking up before 9AM
    2. Get dressed. A lot of people I know don’t get out of their pajamas when they work from home. This is a HUGE mistake. Get up, take a shower and get dressed as if you were going to your office. Maybe you can dress down a little bit and wear jeans instead of dress pants but put real pants on!
    3. Create a distraction free work space. If you have an home office now is the time to use it. Clean it up and get yourself setup like you would in your real office. If you need an extra monitor then go get one!
    4. Eat regular meals. When you get up have your breakfast like normal. For me that is usually just a protein bar and a glass of water. Eat a small but filling lunch to keep your body happy.
    5. Take breaks. I can’t stress this one enough. When you aren’t working from home you will often take breaks that you don’t even realize like: chatting with coworkers, going to get coffee. I often take breaks to stretch or walk around. The most important thing to do is stop working for a few minutes and remember that you need to recharge for just a few minutes.

    I hope these tips help some of you if you are new to working from home. If you have any other tips feel free to add them below in the comments!