Abstract

My kids brought home spelling lists every week, but memorizing words wasn't improving their legibility or accuracy. So I built Bee Hunter... an app that uses computer vision to evaluate handwriting directly from a photo and provide real-time feedback. Building it meant applying the same reliability thinking used in production systems, but with a very different user base. When your users are in elementary school, you can't afford high latency or an outage. Here's what I learned designing for reliability when your error budget is a kid's attention span:

• Why a spelling app taught me more about feedback loop latency than most production systems I've run
• The observability patterns that helped me understand what was actually degrading the experience
• What it looks like to define an SLO when your user can't file a ticket... they just quit
• The edge cases I had to engineer around: varying lighting, backwards letters, kitchen table chaos I'll walk through the architecture decisions and the tradeoffs I made to keep it reliable under real-world conditions. You'll see what a reliability mindset looks like in practice... and how the lessons translate directly back to the systems you're running today. Sometimes the best reliability engineering happens outside the datacenter, with your kids by your side.

Bio

Aaron is a Principal Developer Advocate at AWS based in Frisco, TX. With over 15 years of experience spanning system administration, networking, and training, he brings more than a decade of cloud expertise to help Engineers, Developers, Builders, and tech enthusiasts master AWS technologies. His philosophy is simple: always be learning something new, and have fun while doing it! Aaron shares his knowledge through workshops, online courses, mentoring, and live streaming – making complex cloud concepts accessible and enjoyable. When he's not building in the cloud, you'll find him exploring craft beer scenes in new cities or teaming up with friends in Marvel Rivals on his PlayStation, because even superheroes need good teammates!

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