https://felixmakinda.com/blog Essays on technology, careers, book reviews, history, psychology, religion, politics, finance, education, relationships and geography. en https://felixmakinda.com/blog/equal-trust-is-not-a-strategy https://felixmakinda.com/blog/equal-trust-is-not-a-strategy Psychology Sat, 31 Oct 2026 19:23:14 GMT My AI agent trusted every player equally and lost most rounds, while another engineer's agent won every round. I have lost the same way in life, once with money a friend was meant to use to import a car for me. Here is the scoring arithmetic, the code, and what it says about Edwin Sifuna's choice for 2027. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/build-secure-ai-agents-on-your-laptop https://felixmakinda.com/blog/build-secure-ai-agents-on-your-laptop Technology Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:29:10 GMT My last post explained how AWS secures AI agents on Amazon EKS. This one is the code. We rebuild every idea on a laptop with free tools, a model gateway, MCP tools behind per-persona rules, a sandbox for model-written code and end-to-end tracing, and test each one as we go. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/securing-ai-agents-on-amazon-eks https://felixmakinda.com/blog/securing-ai-agents-on-amazon-eks Technology Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:59:36 GMT I spent a day building an AI customer-service agent on Amazon EKS and growing it into one that writes code and opens pull requests. The agent barely changed. Everything that made it safe lived in the platform around it. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/government-by-magic-spell https://felixmakinda.com/blog/government-by-magic-spell Politics Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:00:13 GMT In a Somali short story we read for KCSE, a clan rules a country with a ten-year-old girl, a jinni and a spell that cures citizens of curiosity. The week Rwanda won Formula 1, Kenyans went looking for the spell in our own Cabinet. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-full-stack-web-app https://felixmakinda.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-full-stack-web-app Technology Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:03:16 GMT What actually happens when you click "Save" in a web app? Using a small car inventory app built with React, Spring Boot and MariaDB, we follow three everyday actions (listing, adding and deleting) from the button to the database and back, with diagrams and the real code. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/bird-box-kox-doxxing-digital-footprint https://felixmakinda.com/blog/bird-box-kox-doxxing-digital-footprint Technology Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:03:50 GMT A Newsmax host compared American cities to Nairobi. Within hours Kenyans on X had his apology, and his phone number. A computer scientist's look at context collapse, doxxing and hacktivism, and how exposed every one of us already is. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/platform-engineering-on-eks-lessons https://felixmakinda.com/blog/platform-engineering-on-eks-lessons Technology Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:22:39 GMT I joined AWS's online lab on Amazon EKS to see how applications should be deployed and managed in production. Seven lessons, from why even the build pipeline should go through Git to why a slow release should fail its canary, and why a platform makes AI safer. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/spring-security-without-websecurityconfigureradapter https://felixmakinda.com/blog/spring-security-without-websecurityconfigureradapter Technology Fri, 09 Oct 2026 21:21:57 GMT WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter no longer exists in Spring Security 7. Here is how a classic Spring Boot 2 security setup (in-memory users, database users and JWT login) looks on Spring Boot 4.1, side by side and tested. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/vibe-coding-design-resources https://felixmakinda.com/blog/vibe-coding-design-resources Technology Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:18:55 GMT Ask an AI agent for a modern landing page and you get the average of the internet. Taste is a deviation from the average. Here are 25 resources that give your agent something to deviate towards, checked, corrected and sorted into five jobs: see, say, build, move and finish. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/hesabu-lab-free-3d-math-game-for-kids https://felixmakinda.com/blog/hesabu-lab-free-3d-math-game-for-kids Technology Sun, 04 Oct 2026 15:10:20 GMT When my son started to struggle with maths, I remembered how we dreaded "remainders" in Grade 2. So I built Hesabu Lab, a free 3D math game for kids where ten marbles become one crate and carrying, borrowing and remainders finally make sense. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/one-people-of-the-mara https://felixmakinda.com/blog/one-people-of-the-mara History Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:12:54 GMT Kipsigis tradition calls Bureti and Sotik an "upper Kisii". Kuria elders say they lived with the Gusii at Gutura. The sources point to one people split by later labels, and the place names along the rivers of the Mau may show the road they took. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/unsupervised-learning-pca-kmeans-wine https://felixmakinda.com/blog/unsupervised-learning-pca-kmeans-wine Technology Sun, 05 Jul 2026 06:00:00 GMT Given the chemistry of 178 wines and no labels, can a machine discover that they come from three grape varieties? It can, but only if you get one preprocessing step right. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/naive-bayes-from-scratch https://felixmakinda.com/blog/naive-bayes-from-scratch Technology Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:00:00 GMT Naive Bayes is a classifier you can compute with a pencil. We work one out by hand, see why smoothing matters, then build a tuned sentiment classifier in scikit-learn. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/support-vector-machines-scaling-kernels https://felixmakinda.com/blog/support-vector-machines-scaling-kernels Technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT An SVM draws the widest possible street between two classes. We build one on tumour measurements, see what unscaled features do to it, and learn what C and gamma control. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/linear-regression-insurance-costs https://felixmakinda.com/blog/linear-regression-insurance-costs Technology Fri, 19 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT We fit a linear regression to 1,338 insurance bills, interpret every coefficient, check the assumptions, compare Lasso, and then let the residuals show us the model we should have built. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/random-forests-in-practice https://felixmakinda.com/blog/random-forests-in-practice Technology Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT Random forests are the dependable workhorse of tabular ML. We test four things people get wrong about them, on real tumour data, and one of the answers surprised me. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/decision-trees-diabetes-screening https://felixmakinda.com/blog/decision-trees-diabetes-screening Technology Thu, 28 May 2026 06:00:00 GMT A decision tree is a flowchart the computer writes for you. We build one on real clinical data, read its rules in plain English, and watch it overfit. https://felixmakinda.com/blog/vibe-coding-and-the-return-of-the-software-crisis https://felixmakinda.com/blog/vibe-coding-and-the-return-of-the-software-crisis Technology Thu, 01 Jan 2026 19:05:00 GMT AI can now turn a prompt into working software. That is real progress, and it is also how the software crisis of the 1960s began: output outran understanding. Why engineering discipline matters more in the AI era, not less.