🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Andrea Carratta, co-founder of Cloud Ninja and AWS Community Builder. Andrea is a prolific creator and great .NET builder. He regularly posts on his blog and shares his knowledge on all things computer science - not just serverless. Thank you for everything you do, Andrea!

💯 Spotlight

I’m a firm believer that developers should build and host their personal websites “the hard way.” Meaning built through some means of static site generation or web framework and hosted in something like an S3 bucket. Wordpress, Wix, and other low/no code site management suites work incredibly well, but managing your own site gives you a little bit of development practice and helps with your ongoing education. This is why I like last week’s post from Johannes Koch so much. He went through some serious struggle to setup a site with a custom domain in a multi-account AWS environment. This article details his process and offers the exact path and code to doing it yourself.

🔥 My Favorite Content

AI agents are leading the hype trend lately, and for good reason. They’re fundamentally changing the way we approach solving problems these days and have opened the door for opportunities we’ve never had before. It’s fascinating to see some of the capabilities being introduced to enhance agents - like memory. Davide De Sio wrote an article last week about how he added memory to agents build with the Strands Agents SDK. He tackles a problem I’ve been working on recently, which is providing better DX and support for serverless/stateless agents. This is a good read and hopefully jogs some ideas for building cool stuff.

In a super practical, short-but-sweet post from Chris Cook last week, we learned how to flatten an array of arrays using JSONata in Step Functions. This post is awesome - it doesn’t tangent at all and keeps you focused on solving what feels like a niche problem but is actually more common than you’d think. We need more articles like this.

Not a serverless read, but an important one - Danielle Heberling shared her thoughts last week on making security practices actually happen. We often talk about security and how it’s so great, then leave it by the wayside to chase cool features or try out emerging tech. This is a systemic problem in the tech industry, and Danielle has a few tips how she makes security feel like a feature to developers - not a hindrance.

Maurice Borgmeier published a nifty article last week showing us how to trigger a Lambda function from the Elgato Stream Deck. I had no idea this was possible, and turns out - it’s not really. The article goes through building a plugin for the Stream Deck that can trigger a configurable function. It’s a neat idea that may or may not have the best security implications - but I do love the idea.

💡 Tip of the Week

Lately I’ve been having some great conversations around software developers vs software engineers. Yan Cui must have been a fly on the wall in those conversations, because I love how he visualized it last week.

🐣 New Releases

Reminder - AWS News is the best source for AWS-related service announcements. For all releases and summaries of what happened, head over there!

S3 Express One Zone now has RenameObject API! For some reason up until last week, if you wanted to rename an object in S3, you had to copy it and modify the name in the copy operation. But now you don’t have to do that - yay!

AWS has open-sourced their API Models, which will give developers access to API definitions for all services. Huge win here.

Last Words

I’ve seen lots of articles published recently either completely written or mostly written by LLMs. For the sake of everyone reading this newsletter - I’ve decided to omit blogs clearly written by LLMs. Please give us originality, show your voice, and share your thoughts as an individual. We’re here to learn from each other, not from ChatGPT.

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