Our serverless superhero this week is Martina Della Corte, Cloud Architect at K3 and AWS Community Builder. Martina is a wonderful writer, speaker, and an outstanding leader for women in tech. She’s active in the AWS Women’s User Group Sweden and in many other tech enablement groups. Thank you so much for everything you do, Martina!
Should we start off with a hot take? In the midst of vibe coding growing more popular than ever, Pedro Tavares posted an articled claiming that writing code was never the bottleneck. His theory flips the bit on the productivity of LLM-based coding and says code output isn’t what makes software development slow, it’s code reviews, knowledge transfer, testing, debugging, and a hundred more things. Pedro goes on to describe the problem a bit more in a way I hadn’t really considered. It’s a great way to think about the road we’re speedily going down.
Speaking of vibe coding, Michael Walmsley gave a talk for the Believe in Serverless community called “Maximize your VIBE with Amazon Q”. This talk is full of practical tips on making the most out of Amazon Q CLI (or any AI-based CLI) and has lots of gems throughout that make you go “oh I like that”. I appreciate Michael’s handle on this topic, you can tell he has lots of experience with it. Great stuff.
It’s been a while since I’ve dug into some of the lesser-known configuration options of the AWS SDK. I really appreciated Maik WiesmΓΌller’s article last week on configuring backoff and retry in the AWS SDK. In case you didn’t know, the SDK will automatically retry failed operations for you. And as it turns out, you can tune how many times, how much to backoff, and the type of retry used. Maik covers how to do that, but also gives us some more tips on writing code that is safe to retry when errors occur.
Jimmy Dahlqvist has the best ideas. Not only are his ideas great, he actually implements them then shares his breakdown with us on his blog. Last week he taught us how he added automatic proofreading to his blog to catch spelling and grammatical errors. His website is backed by several microservices that enhance his content and do a lot of heavy lifting for him automatically, very much like this newsletter and my blog. Jimmy not only goes into his build, but also explains a bit about the Amazon Nova models, which are growing in capabilities seemingly faster than everyone else. Great job, Jimmy!
Somebody asked me last week what I recommended for UI automation testing. I’ll spare you the rabbit hole of an answer I had and share with you the answer I wish I had seen earlier. Christian Bonzelet has been doing some really cool stuff with Amazon Q Developer and browser automation using the Playwright MCP server π₯
Reminder - AWS News is the best source for AWS-related service announcements. For all releases and summaries of what happened, head over there!
Amazon Q chat in the AWS Console can now query and analyze data in your services directly. I’m really happy about this, it’s what I thought Q was going to be on launch.
AWS launched their Builder Center - which is a centralized location for all builders to share their content and give centralized feedback. I like the concept and really hope it plays out like how AWS expects. I’ll be curious to see what this does (if anything) to dev.to and other publication sites.
I’m not sure what happened, but there was an announcement about an Amazon S3 Tables MCP server that was quickly taken down. Apparently you will be able to create, populate, and query S3 Tables with natural language once they release it for real.
It was a light week for content, but that’s ok! It’s summer and I hope people are doing what I’m doing and spending time outside. All too often we get ourselves stuck in ruts because we get tunnel vision on work or our side projects and we forget to take care of ourselves and literally touch grass. Anyway, thank you for reading and I hope you have a great week!
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
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