I'm Michael, aka Focus Otter 🦦. I'm a software engineer living in the Midwest, currently a Staff Developer Advocate at Auth0 (Okta). My passion is taking complex parts of development and making them approachable through demos, articles, and videos. These days I'm deep in AI agents, MCP, identity and auth, fullstack NextJS and TypeScript apps, and hardware builds.
My Raspberry Pi used to need a monitor, a keyboard, and me typing every line. Now Grok Bot builds and flashes my hardware projects through a private MCP server, and I can kick it off from my phone or my desk. In this post, I'll show you how the whole workflow fits together.
There are three ways to let an AI agent spend your money, and only one of them avoids handing over a secret. In this post, I will show you all three, and why the newest one is really just OAuth with a dollar sign.
From local development to production. I share my thoughts on the simplest path to integrate Vercel with AWS Backend Services.
Sharp is a popular library for resizing images in Node.js. However, getting it to work in an AWS Lambda function can be tricky. This post shows how to deploy it as a Lambda function layer.
