🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Danny Thompson, Director of Technology at This Dot and self-proclaimed pickleball aficionado 😂. While Danny’s not so much a serverless guy (as much as I’ve tried), he is an INCREDIBLE asset to the technical community. The amount of people he has enabled, inspired, and educated are exceeded by very few. I am in constant awe of his story and ability to get people where they want to go. Danny, a sincere THANK YOU for what you do for this community.

💯 Spotlight

I have been asking the Step Functions team for years when they were going to support marshalling and unmarshalling data natively in a workflow. I thought it was coming when they released JSONata support, but no such luck. But that didn’t stop Benoît Bouré from taking it on himself. Last week, he published an article showing us how he unmarshalls data from DynamoDB natively in Step Functions using a custom JSONata function. Honestly I didn’t even know you could run custom functions, so it’s super cool to find out that A) you can, and B) Benoît created a function that unmarshalls data. Amazing work my friend!

🔥 My Favorite Content

The hype for AppSync events launch at the of October felt like a flash in the pan to me. We were all super excited and talked about it, nobody used it, then we stopped talking about it. But it’s genuinely a good service! It makes building with WebSockets in AWS much easier than what we had before. But as good as it is, I don’t think it’s what we truly wanted. I published my biased opinion on what you actually want while going into detail about how AppSync events works and what it does. I’m impressed with the simplicity, but feel like they shouldn’t have given us exactly what we asked for.

In my article above, I talk about one of the shortcomings being the lack of message buffering. Meaning if a connection drops and reconnects, any messages that were published during that time are lost. With message buffering, they’d be delivered on reconnect. Since AppSync events doesn’t do that out of the box, Mohammed Izzy spent some time figuring out how to guarantee message delivery. This is a very clever design and undoubtedly helps with data reliability. Mohammed and I had a chat on potential issues with his solution in the Believe in Serverless Discord that is absolutely worth the read if you want more information on the subject.

Now if you’re wondering what it’s like to actually build with AppSync events, Elias Brange has you covered. He wrote an article about how to use it for event-driven unit tests which is such an incredibly cool use case. He walks through the different approaches and assumptions he made about it which resulted in a solution a bit trickier than his last attempt. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly helpful to see a builder with real-time communication experience approach the service.

There has been a lot of content recently around managing complexity (I suspect because of Werner Vogel’s keynote at re:Invent). It’s an all-too-real problem that plagues pretty much all software, from startups to enterprises. As applications grow, entropy rises, and as a result you get increasing complexity. I love James Eastham’s take on managing complexity in his video from last week. He covers accidental complexity, evolving architecture, fundamentals of modern software systems, and more 💙.

💡 Tip of the Week

When I saw this post from Khawaja Shams last week, I was hit with a “why have I never thought about it this way before?” I love the way Khawaja makes people think differently with his insights and out-of-the-box thinking.

🐣 New Releases

GitHub announced a Copilot free plan last week, enabling developers to try Copilot in VSCode and GitHub for free. While not an unlimited usage plan, it should still boost your productivity quite a bit every month.

Jeff Barr, a man that needs no introduction, announced last week that he is wrapping up his time as lead blogger at AWS to spend more time building. He’s had an incredible run as lead blogger and is a prolific writer, but who can blame him? Once a builder, always a builder. Congrats and thank you, Jeff!

Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large is now available in Amazon Bedrock. This is a huge model with tons of features. Very exciting!

Last Words

Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are all this week! To all who celebrate - happy holidays. As someone who’s been thrust into the world of “people going through something”, I want to remind you to always be kind. Most people who are going through serious trauma won’t tell you about it, and it gets exponentially worse around the holidays. Reach out to those who you think might be having a hard time, and be nice to everyone by default 💙💙.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen