🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Thomas Aribart, open source maintainer and AWS Community Builder. Thomas is the core maintainer of DynamoDB-Toolbox, which is a lightweight query builder for DynamoDB and TypeScript. Thank you for all your hard work and community support, Thomas!

💯 Spotlight

Have you tried Amazon Q Developer in GitHub yet? I mistakenly let that slip by me when it was announced last week and had to do a double take when I watched a video from Raphael Manke and Johannes Koch. Their video goes through many of the agentic capabilities ranging from working on GitHub issues to reviewing pull requests. They also show you how to enable it in a repository and give some thoughts on where they think it’s going. It’s very, very cool!

🔥 My Favorite Content

When Amazon Cognito began charging for machine-to-machine access tokens last year, many developers started reconsidering their use of the service. Some people abandoned the service completely, while others had to make changes in their consumption to cost optimize. Lee Gilmore wrote a fantastic article last week that helps you do the latter, showing us how to cache M2M tokens for cost and performance optimizations. In traditional Lee fashion, he paints a fantastic picture of the problem he’s solving with working code, clear diagrams, and a fun use case.

I’m not sure where James Eastham is pulling his inspiration from, but I’m loving the work he’s been doing lately. Last week, he published a video describing the ports and adapters pattern for serverless functions. He walks us through a story of building Lambda functions as… Lambda functions rather than entry points for business logic. I like the way James reframes the approach to building on top of functions for better long term maintainability.

Andres Moreno and I went back to the fundamentals last week and did a livestream on API design - but with a twist. We covered how to design an API for both human and AI consumption. We explored some new features from Postman that enable spec-driven development and automatically generate AI agent code. But I’d say the biggest takeaways were the discussions we had around the subtle differences in design when a machine is your primary consumer. It was a great video with some thought provoking use cases.

There are a few solid container options in AWS when you need a stateful component in your application. My two personal favorites are AWS App Runner and ECS Fargate. But which one is better? Well that’s exactly what Luciano Mammino and Conor Maher discussed in an episode of AWS Bites last week. They go through pricing, autoscaling, and their likes/dislikes. No spoilers here, you’ll have to watch the episode to see which one wins.

💡 Tip of the Week

I found this post from Daniel Stenberg an interesting counter argument to Amazon Q Developer in GitHub. It’s a cautious reminder that all that glitters is not gold.

🐣 New Releases

Stripe released Workflows last week. Which is a way to build and run automations directly in Stripe. You can see the influence there from the former Step Functions PMs - I love it!

As mentioned in our spotlight, Amazon Q Developer in GitHub was announced in preview.

Last Words

It seemed like a quiet week. There was some great content, but for whatever reason things seemed chill. Did I miss something you think should have been featured? Please let me know!

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