🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Jeevan Dongre, co-founder and CEO of AntStack and AWS Serverless Hero. Jeevan has helped hundreds (probably actually thousands) of developers not only learn about serverless, but build production-ready systems with it. He has a fantastic handle on how it works and when to use it. Thank you for everything you do, Jeevan!

💯 Spotlight

In the last issue of the newsletter, we celebrated Aurora DSQL going generally available. This issue, we’re going to see how much it costs. Marc Bowes wrote an extremely entertaining and helpful article on “how to spend a dollar on DSQL”. He shows you exactly how much you can get for your money. I love this!

🔥 My Favorite Content

It’s been a minute since I’ve seen a no-holds-barred-tell-it-how-it-is post. Last week, Thomas Ptacek published an extremely well-written article titled My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts that throws a lot of punches backed with solid reasoning. Whether you’re into using AI for everything or stay away from it like it’s the plague - give this one a read.

I need to backtrack two weeks to an article I forgot to include last week (shame on me). Jason Wadsworth wrote a blog post on a concept near to my heart - adaptive infrastructure on AWS. It’s about changing the type of infrastructure running your code based on actual usage. This is something Ampt is doing, but it’s neat to see a peek at how to implement it yourself.

Lately we’ve seen a few stories about poisoning AI agent workflows through various forms of prompt injection. Simcha Kosman released some content last week showing us all the places poisoning can be done and the effectiveness of it through a series of tests. Not only can you trick an LLM via natural language in tool and field descriptions, but you can also trick it with error messages coming back from your tools. While the title might be a bit sensational, it’s definitely worthy of a read.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the biggest success stories with AI and coding being migrations or big refactors. Rather than using AI to vibe code its way through greenfield, giving it the constraints of an existing system with unit and integration tests helps with the effectiveness and time to completion. Damien Gallagher wrote an article last week about his experience using Claude Code to modernize a legacy Java application. This is a great, practical example of how to use AI as a coding partner to perform major code changes.

💡 Tip of the Week

Knowing architecture patterns, multiple programming languages, and being a 10x coder isn’t everything when it comes to having a successful career in software development. Ben Pyle gave us his three things last week that help you stand out as a top tier engineer.

🐣 New Releases

Congratulations to the new AWS Heroes! Christian Bonzelet, David Victoria, and Nora Schöner - we are so happy and proud!

Last week was the annual Postman conference, and what a week for announcements from this API giant! Here’s the full keynote recap, but a quick sneak peak of the big releases were a new API designer, a full suite of insight tools, big features to make your APIs stand out on the API network, and agent mode!

Amazon Q received some agentic capabilities that help with debugging. Apparently now you can ask it things like “why is my payment Lambda function getting errors” and it will read logs and diagnose issues for you 🔥

API Gateway can now use routing rules to direct traffic for REST APIs. You can setup rules based on headers, path parameters, or both and route to different resources. This is great for things like API versioning or conditional streaming responses.

Last Words

Wow, we had a lot going on last week! Big advancements in AI and APIs, cool stories, and a bunch more great topics in and around computer science. I’m wondering - how are you staying up to date on everything that’s going on? Where are you going for information? 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