NextLink Labs

NextLink Labs At NextLink Labs we are focused on delivering strategy and executions with the goal to optimize business outcomes. Contact us to learn more!

NextLink Labs helps companies achieve lasting success with best-in-class technology! We utilize Cybersecurity Strategies, DevOps Services, and Custom Software Solutions to meet your business's goals.

Tomorrow we're joining Catalyst Connection for a webinar on AI in manufacturing engineering — and I want to be honest ab...
05/06/2026

Tomorrow we're joining Catalyst Connection for a webinar on AI in manufacturing engineering — and I want to be honest about why we agreed to do it.

Most AI conversations in manufacturing right now are either too abstract to act on, or they're a product demo in disguise.

What Saunders, Burmaster, and Chellappan are going to talk about tomorrow is different — what engineering teams inside manufacturing companies can actually implement today, without overhauling their stack or betting on tools that aren't ready.

If you're a CTO, engineering manager, platform engineer, or controls engineer trying to figure out where AI genuinely fits into your practice — this is the hour worth clearing on your calendar.

📅 Tomorrow — Thursday, May 7
🕛 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM ET
💻 Free. Online.

Link in the comments — seats are still open.

We're joining Catalyst Connection this Thursday for a webinar we've been wanting to run for a while.AI Without the Hype:...
05/04/2026

We're joining Catalyst Connection this Thursday for a webinar we've been wanting to run for a while.

AI Without the Hype: What Engineering Teams in Manufacturing Can Actually Do Today.

Not a demo. Not a vendor pitch. A real conversation about where AI fits into engineering practice inside manufacturing companies — and where it doesn't.

If your team builds and maintains the software that powers your products, machines, or operational systems, this is for you.

Saunders, Burmaster, and Chellappan from NextLink Labs will be leading the session — 20+ years of combined experience helping technology leaders cut through the noise and find what actually works.

📅 Thursday, May 7
🕛 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET
💻 Free. Online.

Registration link in the comments.

Two problems that eat engineering time every week.Writing GitLab pipelines from scratch.Most CI files start from a half-...
04/29/2026

Two problems that eat engineering time every week.

Writing GitLab pipelines from scratch.
Most CI files start from a half-broken template nobody fully trusts — no scanning, no caching, no parallel stages. Rewriting them is fine work, but it's slow and the mistakes don't show up until the first failed run at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Alex Podobnik has been using Claude Code for internal GitLab pipelines and wrote up exactly what that workflow looks like — rootless BuildKit, Trivy scanning with a hard fail on HIGH and CRITICAL, proper layer caching, and a staging tag so vulnerable images never touch the registry. Where Claude Code earns its keep, and where it doesn't.

Importing existing infrastructure into Terraform.
You open the AWS console, find 15 EC2 instances, a dozen S3 buckets, and a VPC with security groups nobody fully understands — all created by hand, none of it in code. The old way: pull the details, write the HCL, run plan, read the diff, fix it, repeat. 15 minutes per resource. 50 resources. Do the math.

With Claude Code running the agentic loop — pulling from AWS CLI, writing HCL, running plan, reading the diff, fixing it — 25 S3 buckets takes 20–30 minutes unattended.

Both pieces just dropped in the NextLink newsletter. Written by engineers, for engineers.

Links in the comments.

Every infrastructure engagement has the same moment.You open the AWS console and find 15 EC2 instances, a dozen S3 bucke...
04/27/2026

Every infrastructure engagement has the same moment.

You open the AWS console and find 15 EC2 instances, a dozen S3 buckets, a VPC with security groups nobody fully understands — all created by hand, none of it in Terraform.

Getting it under Terraform management is one of the most tedious jobs in infrastructure work. Not because it's hard. Because it's slow.

The old way:
→ Pull the resource details from AWS
→ Figure out the right Terraform resource type
→ Write the HCL by hand
→ Run terraform plan, see a massive diff
→ Tweak, re-plan, repeat

For one resource: 15 minutes.
For 50 resources: a full day.

Claude Code changes this entirely. You hand it the job, it runs the AWS CLI itself, writes the HCL, runs the plan, reads the diff, fixes it, and loops until the plan is clean — unattended.

25 S3 buckets: 20–30 minutes of Claude Code working while you do something else. By hand: most of a day.

Podobnik wrote up exactly how we structure this — the CLAUDE.md setup, the agentic loop, and how to scope bulk imports without losing control of what gets touched.

Link in the comments.

Two things shipping engineers deal with every week:Your AI coding assistant doesn't actually know your database.Claude C...
04/22/2026

Two things shipping engineers deal with every week:

Your AI coding assistant doesn't actually know your database.
Claude Code can read your code, run your tests, and refactor entire modules — but ask it "how many active users do we have?" and it's guessing. It's reading your models, inferring your schema, and suggesting a query you still have to run yourself.

The fix is a lightweight MCP server — 100 lines of Node.js, 60 lines of Ruby — that gives Claude Code safe, read-only SQL access to your Rails app. Then it can just answer the question directly.

Your AWS accounts are being managed by hand.
One account becomes two, two becomes five, and eventually someone is clicking through the console trying to remember which account has which guardrails. SCPs drift. Exceptions get added. Nobody documents it.

AWS Organizations + Terraform is the fix. Treat any console-based SCP change as immediate technical debt.

Both of these just landed in the NextLink newsletter — Colin Soleim on the MCP server build, Alex Podobnik on AWS Organizations. Practical and ready to implement.

Links in the comments.

Your software has vulnerabilities. That's not a maybe — it's a mathematical certainty.The average application has 20–30 ...
04/21/2026

Your software has vulnerabilities. That's not a maybe — it's a mathematical certainty.

The average application has 20–30 open-source dependencies. Each one carries its own history of CVEs, misconfigurations, and undiscovered flaws. Multiply that across every service, library, and infrastructure component in your environment and the attack surface becomes enormous.

Traditional scanning tools catch what they know. They're pattern matchers — great at flagging known signatures, terrible at reasoning about context.

They can't tell you:
→ Is this CVE actually reachable in my application?
→ Does this IAM policy become dangerous in combination with this S3 bucket and this Lambda trigger?
→ Is this business logic flaw even on the map?

That gap between "this vulnerability exists" and "this vulnerability is exploitable in your environment" is where most real risk lives.

It's also where we've integrated Claude into our security assessment workflow.

Not to replace our security engineers. To make them faster, more thorough, and harder to fool. Claude handles the systematic review. Our engineers focus on what actually matters.

Travis Burmaster, Solution Architect at NextLink Labs, wrote up exactly how we structure this — the context engineering, the iterative depth, and what it means for how clients prioritize remediation.

Worth a read if you're responsible for a software portfolio and want to know where your real risks are — not just the ones your current tooling can see.

🔗 Full post in the comments.

Two things that quietly slow down every engineering team:Infrastructure that drifts between environments.Production look...
04/15/2026

Two things that quietly slow down every engineering team:

Infrastructure that drifts between environments.
Production looks nothing like staging. Staging looks nothing like dev. Nobody knows when it diverged — or why.

AI tools that don't actually know your codebase.
You give Claude Code access to a 400-model Rails app. It doesn't know your soft delete patterns, your filter conventions, or your role mappings. So it guesses.

Both problems are fixable. Both fixes are boring in the best way — configuration over cleverness.

This month's newsletter covers both:

→ How to use Terraform Workspaces so drift becomes structurally impossible — one module, one pipeline, one workspace convention. The only differences between environments are the ones written down.

→ How to configure Claude Code for large Rails codebases so it's actually productive — CLAUDE.md , MCP database access, and why Ruby is, as Garry Tan put it, "LLM catnip."

Written by engineers. No fluff.

If this is the kind of content you want in your inbox every month, subscribe link is in the comments.

There’s a reason teams avoid fixing foundational problems.They’re not fun.They’re not flashy.And they usually don’t brea...
02/06/2026

There’s a reason teams avoid fixing foundational problems.

They’re not fun.
They’re not flashy.
And they usually don’t break things right away.

Until they do.

- The infra config no one fully understands
- The pipeline that’s “good enough” but impossible to scale
- The environments that feel more like landmines than stages
- The compliance box you keep checking… until an audit checks back

At NextLink Labs, we’re not hired when things are easy.
We’re hired when shortcuts stop working.

🔹 We build real systems — quietly, permanently, and for the long haul.
🔹 We bring clarity where there’s inherited complexity.
🔹 And we turn fragile delivery into something teams can trust again.

📩 If your stack is filled with “we’ll fix it later” decisions -
Later might already be here.
👉 Schedule a consultation: https://buff.ly/sNU9ajw

Not all velocity is progress.Sometimes, it’s just a countdown to incident.Code’s shipping faster.Deploys are getting lea...
02/04/2026

Not all velocity is progress.
Sometimes, it’s just a countdown to incident.

Code’s shipping faster.
Deploys are getting leaner.
The team is moving.

But…

- Rollbacks are more frequent
- Test coverage is shrinking
- Security is reacting, not preventing
- No one’s sure if the pipeline is stable - or just hasn’t broken yet

At NextLink Labs, we work with engineering orgs that don’t want speed at the cost of trust.

🔹 Pipelines designed for resilience, not just throughput
🔹 Security built into delivery - not bolted on after
🔹 Infra that scales without increasing fragility
🔹 SDLCs that protect momentum instead of destroying it

Because the win isn’t how fast you move -
it’s how far you get without breaking.

If your team’s pace is finally up,
let’s make sure your system can keep up without burning out.
https://buff.ly/xkwXSfQ

You’ve got a staging environment that only one person knows how to reset.A CI pipeline that breaks if you name a branch ...
01/30/2026

You’ve got a staging environment that only one person knows how to reset.
A CI pipeline that breaks if you name a branch wrong.
A test suite nobody trusts.
And an approval process that depends on Slack pings.

But somehow... releases still happen.
Features still go out.
Teams still push forward.

Until one day, everything hits at once:
- Merge conflicts.
- Failed deploy.
- Hotfix rollback.
- Security flag.

And leadership asks:

“Why aren’t we more efficient?”

Because duct tape feels fast - until you need structure.

At NextLink Labs, we help engineering orgs build real systems:

🔹 CI/CD pipelines that reflect reality, not wishful thinking
🔹 DevSecOps flows that are invisible when they work - and obvious when they don’t
🔹 Infrastructure that scales with confidence, not hope
🔹 Delivery patterns that teams don’t have to work around

📩 If your team is performing in spite of your systems - it’s time to build ones they can actually rely on.
https://buff.ly/xkwXSfQ

Address

2545 Railroad Street Suite 100
Pittsburgh, PA
15222

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Telephone

+14122583252

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