Rohini Gaonkar for AWS

Posted on Apr 15

Lost in the AI Hype, I Started Small

#aws #ai #beginners #productivity

And it helped me get back into tech without drowning

TL;DR at the end

Coming back to tech after a (maternity) break is a strange feeling.

You’re excited but also unsure where to begin. There are new tools, new terminologies and new way of doing things we did for decades.

But I didn’t try to figure everything out at one go, I just picked one small thing.

For me, that “one small thing” was finally building my portfolio collection.

Over the years, my content - blog posts, YouTube videos, conference talks, GitHub repos, social posts all of them scattered across dev.to, GitHub, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and AWS channels - has been scattered across a dozen different platforms. DEV.to, community.aws, YouTube, GitHub (two accounts!), LinkedIn, SlideShare... you name it. 🙇‍♀️

More than 80 pieces of content, scattered across platforms since 2015!!!

And honestly? Maintaining my existing site rohinigaonkar.com felt harder than starting from scratch.

I wanted something simpler, a lightweight site I can update by editing a single file, push to GitHub, and it's live. Easy to navigate, easy to maintain. No fluff.

I built this as my first project back from maternity leave, and I did it with Kiro, an AI-powered IDE from AWS that I'd never used before. Two firsts at once. It turned out to be the perfect re-entry project.

Building It with Kiro: My First Impressions

This portfolio had been on my mental to-do list forever, so the timing felt right. And rather than spinning up a complex stack to shake off the rust, I decided to keep it simple and lean on an AI coding assistant to help me get back into the flow.

Here's what stood out about the experience, starting with the simplest features and building up.

Last one might surprise you!!! 🤯

1. Chat-Driven Development

The entire project was built through conversation.

I described what I wanted, "I have this website where I collect my content shared across multiple social media websites. it is one true place where any tech content I posted on the web be it dev.to, github, youtube, instagram, and any aws first party channels, all of this to be collected as a timeline. can we build something that can be refreshed on demand and build this portfolio. make it professional looking. ask more intelligent questions as we go.", and Kiro asked clarifying questions even before writing a single line of code.

It asked about static vs dynamic, hosting preferences, design vibe, and data source approach. It even asked me about my identity. That back-and-forth shaped the architecture before any code was generated.

Once I provided response to all the questions, it help build the initial structure and also walked me through it.

Notice how after every conversation, it shows how many credits each prompt consumes, in real-time. That was nice!

There is a spec-driven development mode as well, which I would be testing for something more complex than this static website.

2. Web Search

Kiro searched the web to find my existing content across platforms. It looked up my dev.to profile, GitHub repos, community.aws presence, YouTube channel, and even my current website at rohinigaonkar.com. This gave it real context about who I am and what content already exists, so the portfolio wasn't built with placeholder data, it was seeded with my actual content from day one.

3. Explore Real-Time File Changes

As Kiro generated and edited the files, I could see every change happening in real time through the explorer. Either click the "Follow" option or click on the little "diff button" highlighted with yellow square below.

For example, it created index.html or content.js, I could immediately open them, review the code, and see the diffs. When it later modified content.js to add YouTube videos or reclassify talks vs videos, I could see exactly what changed and why.

4. Trusting Frequently Run Commands

Kiro ran shell commands like curl to hit APIs and extract data. It asked my permission to run it once or add it to trusted list of commands.

I also liked how it provided my levels of trust, like I can just execute this particular command or partial or the base command.

In autopilot mode, I could trust these commands to execute without approving each one individually. This was especially useful during the YouTube oEmbed batch processing, where Kiro ran 16 consecutive curl commands to fetch video titles, approving each one manually would have been tedious.

5. Iterative Refinement Through Conversation

The project evolved through multiple rounds of feedback:

I pointed out that "talks" should only mean conference/meetup presentations, not YouTube tutorial videos - Kiro reclassified everything accordingly
I noted that some AWS "talks" were actually just YouTube embeds on my website - Kiro dug into the pages, extracted the real YouTube URLs, and recategorized them as videos
I shared my personal GitHub profile separately from my work one - Kiro pulled repos from both and updated the refresh script to handle multiple accounts

Each round of feedback made the portfolio more accurate without starting over or deleting some other important information.

6. The YouTube Challenge : Hitting Walls and Finding Workarounds

This was the most interesting part as YouTube is heavily locked down:

Direct fetch failed - webFetch on youtube.com returned empty content
Rendered mode failed - returned only JavaScript bootstrap code, no actual page content
Search was noisy - web searches for my videos returned generic results, not my specific content
RSS feeds blocked - YouTube's channel RSS wasn't accessible either

*But Kiro didn't give up!!! 💜 *

It found workarounds on its own:

oEmbed API - Kiro discovered that YouTube's oEmbed endpoint (youtube.com/oembed?url=...) returns video titles as JSON, and used curl to call it directly. This became the reliable method for all 16 videos I shared.
Squarespace page parsing - For videos embedded on my website, Kiro parsed the raw HTML to extract YouTube video IDs from Squarespace's embed block JSON (double HTML-unescaping the content to find URLs like youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fi0zQpJPfSdU).
Thumbnail URL extraction - It even tried extracting video IDs from ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/hqdefault.jpg thumbnail patterns as a fallback.

The iterative problem-solving here like trying one approach, hitting a wall, pivoting to another, felt very much like how a developer would debug a scraping problem.

I loved how Kiro told me what it tried, it failed and it was going to try something else. We also worked together for a process that was a good compromise for both of us. Maybe in future I will have an agent to simplify this, but for now this solves my purpose!

The Result

A live static portfolio at rohinigaonkar.github.io with ~80 entries spanning 2015–2025, filterable by type (blogs, videos, repos, talks, social), searchable, and refreshable on demand via a Node.js script that pulls from GitHub and dev.to APIs. All built through conversation in a single Kiro session.

What's Next

I'll keep adding content as I publish it. The refresh script makes the API-sourced stuff automatic, and the manual entries take about 30 seconds each. I might add dark mode at some point, and maybe an RSS feed. But right now, the simplicity is the feature.

More importantly, this project reminded me that coming back doesn't have to be intimidating.

If you're returning from a break and looking for a low-pressure way to get back into coding, I'd recommend picking a passion project and giving Kiro a try. You might surprise yourself with how quickly you get back into the zone.

And follow along as I explore this world of AI.

TL;DR:
Returning to tech after maternity leave felt overwhelming, so I started small by building a portfolio site to consolidate 80+ pieces of content scattered across platforms since 2015. Using AWS Kiro (an AI-powered IDE) for the first time, I built the entire project through conversation—no complex setup needed. Kiro helped with web searches, real-time file changes, iterative refinements, and creative problem-solving (especially when YouTube's APIs were locked down). The result: a live, searchable portfolio at rohinigaonkar.github.io that's easy to maintain. The lesson? Coming back doesn't have to be intimidating—pick one small passion project and let AI tools help you get back into the zone.