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Hi my name is Fred (Mostly) originally from South Africa and I call Australia home now…
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Fred Mare shared this🚀 Celebrating an incredible Xero TechTalks session on the future of software development! A huge thank you to Arden Packeer from AWS for introducing us to the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC)—the structured methodology that helped a Xero team ship an MVP in just two days (a task previously estimated at one month!). Arden showed us: - The proven patterns behind 2–5X development velocity. - Lessons from 100+ AI-DLC engagements, including insights from organisations like S&P Global and Seek. - Why methodology is the key enabler for sustained, AI-native delivery. It's clear the future is moving "From AI-Assisted to AI-Native." This session provided a practical framework for everyone, regardless of where they are on their AI journey. #TechTalks #AWS
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Fred Mare shared thisChain yourself to the desk. Stare into the mirror. Watch the CVEs slowly disappear. 🪞🛡️ Friday, I had the pleasure of hosting our latest Xero TechTalk live from Melbourne, and the energy (despite the distance!) was fantastic. We were joined by Christian J., a seasoned Solutions Architect from Chainguard all the way from Phoenix, Arizona. Christian gave us a masterclass on designing and implementing secure software supply chains. The big takeaway? Security doesn't have to be a bottleneck. By using Chainguard images, we’re looking at: ✅ A massive reduction in the "noise" of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). ✅ Better dependency hygiene through automation. ✅ Practical strategies for managing upstream image variations. Huge thanks to Christian for sharing your expertise with us! 🇦🇺🤝🇺🇸 #Xero #TechTalks
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Fred Mare shared thisI am happy to share I have completed my AWS Certified AI Practitioner certification.AWS Certified AI Practitioner was issued by Amazon Web Services Training and Certification to Frederik Mare.AWS Certified AI Practitioner was issued by Amazon Web Services Training and Certification to Frederik Mare.
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Fred Mare shared thisLast September, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Abi Noda, CEO of DX, for a fireside chat at Xero TechTalks. We dove deep into a challenge every engineering leader faces: the complexity of measuring developer productivity—and how the rise of AI has only added new layers to that puzzle. Today, I was thrilled to receive a signed copy of "Frictionless," authored by Abi and the incredible Nicole Forsgren. What is the book about? It isn't just theory; it’s a practical system designed to help organizations identify and remove the hurdles that slow engineers down. It’s about building environments where developers can do their best work without the "friction." We are incredibly fortunate to have leaders like Abi and Nicole paving the way and providing a roadmap for the rest of the industry. Looking forward to diving into this. Thank you, Abi! #DevEx #Frictionless
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Fred Mare posted thisEnding the week feeling incredibly energised and excited about the future 🎉 I just wrapped up a fantastic two-day workshop with Melanie (Peiyao) Li, where we explored all things GenAI and AgentCore, including the incredible potential of Claude Code and OpenClaw. Melanie is an outstanding Subject Matter Expert, and it's a true privilege to spend time learning from experts of her calibre. Already looking forward to our next session.
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Fred Mare shared thisWhat a way to kick off the Xero TechTalks for 2026 in the Xero Sydney Office 🎉 Despite the weather, nothing could spoil the introduction of our first speaker, James Lewis, a true luminary in software architecture and organisational design from Thoughtworks. James took us on a fascinating journey, from Steve Yegge's GasTown to his famous bet with Gene Kim. He explored the current state of the industry and the challenging implications of GenAI for software delivery. While he didn't promise easy answers, he left us with fascinating new questions about the future of technology. A huge thank you to James for sharing his expertise and insights. #TechTalks #GenAI
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Fred Mare shared thisSpending time at the beautiful new Google office in Melbourne soaking up everything to unlock your AI platform with GKE. Thank you Pritesh Patel for the invitation. Thank you Gari Singh and Artemi Ollin for an excellent session.
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Fred Mare shared thisIt was a personal highlight and a great privilege to meet and introduce Amanda Johnstone at Xero's internal conference today. We had a fun and amazing time together. Thank you for joining us, Amanda!Fred Mare shared thisAbout to take the stage for the Xero internal with team joining from across the globe, the fabulous Principal Engineer Fred Mare doing the intro today. The conversation: intrapreneurship and seeing around corners. #ai #engineering #STEM #keynotespeaker
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Fred Mare shared thisHad a fantastic time on the Cortex Braintrust podcast with CTO Ganesh Datta, where we deep-dived into the essentials of production readiness. I shared my view that skipping a production readiness program is akin to driving without a dashboard—you're completely flying blind. A core theme of our conversation was the necessity of shifting the focus beyond internal standards to a customer-centric definition of readiness: the proven ability to deliver a feature that is secure, highly available, and offers an excellent user experience. We also stressed why proactive issue detection and a criticality-based tiering system are absolutely crucial for engineering reliable services. Tune in for concrete, actionable examples of how this shift in perspective fundamentally transforms the mechanics of your production readiness program!Fred Mare shared thisLots of car analogies on the podcast recently 😂 but I loved this one by Fred Mare – not having a production readiness program is like not having a dashboard in your car. Here's what that means: Before you start a road trip, you probably want to know whether your car is charged/full. If you don't know that... well, you might make it to your destination OR you might find out that the tank was empty when your car stops on the road. Better to set up the right indicators and know ahead of time whether you're ready or not – and that's what production readiness is! Watch the whole episode – link in the comments below.
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked this2 weeks ago, I wrapped up my 5 year journey at Cortex. I could make this post about what's next… but the time for that will come. Today, I just want to reflect on the past 5 years. 5 years ago, I was the starry-eyed Silicon Valley stereotype, eager to build the next big thing, and so, I sent a LI DM to Anish Dhar. In a world full of egoists, I'd luckily found a group of founders who cared about making a change, had no egos, and who I could instantly become friends with. A few weeks of back and forth, and somehow Bansal <> Cortex was a match. And so it began...What followed was the ride of my life. The headrush of shipping a full product in 8 days. (Pre LLM days folks) The anxiety of "will this customer pick us over the crappy solutions." The rollercoaster of incidents, and the weird joy of fixing them. The quiet pride of being called employee #1 for 5 years straight. ...And a million other moments I'll be telling my grandkids about :) If past-me had magical powers and could write a better story for himself, I don't think I'd top the journey I had at Cortex. That's how amazing the last 5 years were for me. Anish Dhar, thanks for taking a chance on me. The single best decision I made in my career… was DMing you. Ganesh Datta, thank you for teaching me everything I know about engineering leadership. And the word "data modelling." Who knew that'd come in handy in this AI coding world. Nikhil Unni, thank you, for being my best friend and part-time therapist... through all of it. I'd have quit a long time ago without you. And Cristina Buenahora, thank you... for being the most badass person I know. And showing me how to build a relentless work ethic, and what a true generalist can do. And to the entire Cortex team, it was an honor. 🫡
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisOne thing I've learned building agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is that "agent memory" is not one thing, and treating it as one thing is where a lot of agents quietly fall apart. The pattern shows up when the agent lives somewhere users come back to asynchronously. A Slack thread, an email assistant, a long-running research task. User asks something, walks away, comes back an hour later, and the agent has no clue who they are or what they were doing. The infrastructure explanation is usually "the serverless container recycled." The real cause is architectural. You were asking one memory mechanism to cover three different retention problems. What I'd actually separate, designing from scratch today: Short-term conversation context. The last N turns of what was literally said. This is not memory you extract or summarise, it is the raw transcript. For a Slack agent, the cleanest answer is to fetch the thread itself on every invocation, because Slack already stores every message with full fidelity and there is no reason to duplicate that. Millisecond latency, zero extraction, always correct. Container recycled? Doesn't matter. The conversation lives on Slack, not in your container. Working state. Projects in progress, artifacts generated, pending decisions. A structured record that tools need to read from and write to as work advances. AgentCore Memory supports custom namespaces for exactly this, so you can carve out your own paths and write explicit snapshots as workflow tools progress. This is the layer where "the agent remembers what we agreed ten minutes ago" actually lives. Long-term semantic memory. Preferences, recurring topics, user context across sessions. This is where AgentCore's managed extraction earns its keep, and also the layer most teams reach for first, which is usually a mistake. It's optimised for summarised recall across time, not operational detail from five minutes ago. Once you see the three as distinct, the fixes are almost boring. Short-term comes from the transport layer. Working state lives in a custom-namespaced store you write into explicitly. Long-term is what managed memory is for. Each layer gets retrieved and injected before the user's actual message. The more agents I build, the more I think memory is not a storage problem, it's a cognition problem. Humans are good collaborators because we remember the right things at the right granularity: the thread of what was just said, the work we're in the middle of, the longer relationship with whoever we're working with. An agent that mimics that shape, even imperfectly, feels intelligent. One that can't feels broken no matter how strong the underlying model is. This is what separates a demo from something people trust. Curious what others are doing here. If you've shipped an agent that stays useful across days and sessions, what patterns have worked for you? Anything that looked clever in a demo but fell apart in production? #AWS #BedrockAgentCore #AgentMemory
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisNew chapter: I've moved into a Principal AI Sales Specialist role in the ANZ team at AWS. After 10 years here in various Solution Architecture roles, including leading the APJ Partner Sales SA team and most recently the APJ Startup SA team, I've had a lot of learnings along the way. Like how customers make decisions and tradeoffs around their architectures, how partners build and go to market, and for the past few years, how startups are experimenting with and scaling AI. Enterprises are now ramping up on AI seriously, and that's exactly the conversation I want to be in. If you're an ANZ enterprise rethinking how AI fits into the work, let's talk. #AWS #AI
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisTomorrow morning many of us set off for #GoogleCloudNext. Every year it's an incredible time for fresh ideas and innovations, but I'm even more excited about this year. Why? Connecting with my customers and constituents whose missions we have been making more achievable than ever. We often talk about the acceleration of the technology, but it's shortening the time to solve that really changes the world. If you're at Next, connect with me or my team and let's keep creating that future together! https://lnkd.in/gmWBjEHN Elizabeth Moon Matthew Schneider Brent Mitchell Gabriel M. Trever Johnson Keith Binder #GooglePublicSector
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisI spend a good amount of my week moving between (MANY) tabs on my laptop, which is why I’m so excited to share that today we are officially rolling out Gemini in Chrome across APAC! Having Gemini built right into the browser turns it into an intelligent partner. You can ask it to compare info from different sites and organise them into a table, or draft a complex email without losing your place. Best of all, as you can tell from the video below there is support for local languages! With that these advanced AI capabilities will be accessible to people across the region. Recently I was researching local tour offerings for Rome and Vatican City and before you know it, I was moving across 4 or 5 new tabs. Gemini in Chrome made the hop from one tab to another to compare offerings so much easier and was a real game changer for my holiday planning productivity. I can't wait to see how everyone uses this to simplify their digital lives. Read more about the rollout here: https://lnkd.in/gQTBtxxm
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisAlready this year I've been invited inside the offices of innovators like Tyro, TikTok, Xero and Optus, leading their teams through the work of seeing around corners and colouring outside the lines. Not as a fluffy "observer", a "speaker" or a "futurist", but as a builder who has done it over decades. The most interesting part - the leaders of these companies are ENCOURAGING diverse thinking. When LinkedIn's Top Companies list launched a decade ago, work was organised around certainty. Career ladders. Five year plans. Job descriptions that actually described the job. Then the lines started moving.. Then they (have mostly) disappeared..! A decade ago most of us would never have imagined we could be leading a team of WFH / hybrid / in person human staff alongside a team of AI agents. I've spent two decades inside Fortune 2000, government and ASX 200 rooms, building and deploying proprietary technology across 80+ countries, filing (and being granted!) patents, designing with global platforms, advising enterprise AI teams and sitting at board level where AI strategy is debated before the market even knows the questions. I don't observe technology. I stress test it. I'm inside before the market, which is exactly why I'm first to it. That proximity is what I bring into every room I lead. Because trends don't emerge randomly. They compound quietly. Headlines are reactive. Data is predictive. The brands pulling ahead aren't reading the news. They're reading patent filings, capital allocation, adoption curves and regulatory divergence, then moving before the market forces them to. My advice for the shifts still to come (for leaders and employees alike!): - Stop waiting for the org chart to give you permission. Curiosity is part of your job description now. - Get comfortable being early. Seeing around the corner means describing something before anyone else in the room can see it. You'll sound slightly strange for a year or two before you sound obvious. That's the whole point. Drop your ideas into an AI tool if you need help communicating it. - Protect your ability to think. The biggest career risk over the next ten years isn't a new technology. It's the slow erosion of the space you need to form a view of your own. Understanding the future should not be confined to boardrooms. It belongs to everyone.. Yes, YOU! #LinkedInTopCompanies #LinkedInNewsAustralia #AILeadership #FutureofWork
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisCan't get any more "We live in the future" than taking a self-driving Waymo back from the AI conference. But that's the thing. The future is now. I just spent two days at the Enterprise AI Leadership Summit—kudos to Gene Kim and his team for a great conference. I took more notes than I have since college. A necessarily wide range of speakers, views, and experiences grappling with this transformative moment in time. What really surprised me was not any of the technical ideas or agentic workflows. It was finding out that healthcare companies, banks, financial institutions, John Deere the tractor company—all of these institutions are all-in on their engineers being AI-first. There were other talks about the challenges of AI, making it safe, addressing compliance, etc., but there was no challenge at all to the idea that we're all going to 10x our work and we're going to do it with AI and we're doing it today. These are not first-mover industries. This is a silent majority moment. The ground has moved under our feet. And the audience for these talks was a room full of several hundred people who mostly had "CEO" on their name tags. Engineers can feel however they want about it, but the debate is over. To be clear, as a pure engineering tool, I am also all in. I have been doing my entire job and beyond in Claude Code since December. The only limits on this tool are how much effort you want to put into understanding it. But it was intense to step out of my bubble and really see the way the wave is already happening. There was a time when cars weren't very good yet and riding a horse was still a reasonable idea. I have to imagine, some folks thought they'd just keep riding their horses, maybe this "car" thing would fade away. We don't have roads for horses anymore, and now the cars drive themselves.
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Fred Mare liked thisFred Mare liked thisI've been to every #GoogleCloudNEXT since 2019. Granted, I had a different last name back then and we had a few virtual ones in between (thanks #COVID!). But it’s amazing to look back...7 years ago, we were completely focused on core cloud infrastructure. Now, the conversation has shifted to #AI and #Agents. This year will be no different, and I couldn't be more excited. Next week, at #GoogleCloudNext26 in Vegas, I’m looking forward to talking with customers and sharing everything we've been working on to help you build agents, alongside a massive lineup of launches across our broader Agents Ecosystem. I’ll even be taking the stage with my good friend Polong Lin to do a deep dive into Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK). If you're in Vegas, come join us! And even if you can't make it in person, make sure to follow along—I'll be sharing updates and key takeaways throughout the week! Learn more about our session on ADK here: https://lnkd.in/g3ZDxjP6 #GoogleCloudNext #AIAgents #AgenticCloud #GeminiAI #ADK #ProductManagement #GenerativeAI
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Microsoft Certified Solution Developer
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