Serverless Picks of the Week
Issue #177: Hello, anybody out there?

🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Aleksandra Ljuboje, DevOps engineer at allOps solutions and AWS Community Builder. Aleksandra is a tremendous advocate for mentorship and knowledge sharing, and regularly boosts community events and spotlights. She’s a genuine force amplifier for community involvement. Thank you for everything you do, Aleksandra!

πŸ’― Spotlight

We talk a lot about LLMs in this newsletter. So let’s continue doing that with a post from Marc Brooker on his thoughts about LLMs as parts of systems. This is a practical take on using LLMs meaningfully as adjuncts to things like databases, browsers, and code interpeters. Marc poses the thought that LLMs are great, but they’re even better when incorporated as a component of a guarded, well-designed system. I like this article because it shows thoughtful design and intention rather than asking an LLM a free text question and returning its answer to a user.

πŸ”₯ My Favorite Content

Developer habits have forever changed with AI built into the IDE, for better or for worse. We often see stories of how development has changed, but rarely see anything about triaging and fixing production errors. That is, until last week when Yanatan Molad-Hayo shared how he diagnosed a serverless incident in 20 minutes. His retelling of the story is a perfect case study of adaptability and using the tools we have available today to do things that would have been impossible a year ago. Love this!

The tech industry is coming a long way really quickly with standards and best practices for building AI agents. I was particularly impressed with a blog by Anton Aleksandrov last week where he laid everything out for us to effectively build AI agents on AWS serverless. If you’ve seen any of the livestreams I’ve done with Andres Moreno on this topic, you’ll know it’s historically been a struggle (at least for JavaScript devs). This blog post shows us meaningful workflow diagrams, introduces capabilities from AWS, and shows how to use the Strands SDK to take advantage of the necessary pieces to get to production.

πŸ’‘ Tip of the Week

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of building with AI. That’s why it’s so important for reality checks every so often that take away the rose colored glasses for a minute. Like this post from Eduardo Ordax.

🐣 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!

AWS announced 6 new heroes into the program last week. Join me in welcoming Kristine Armiyants, Nadia Reyhani, Raphael Manke, Rowan Udell, Chris Park, and Toshal Khawale!

πŸŽ‰ Pick This Week's Favorite!

Your vote helps shape next week's top pick.

Last Words

Wow it was a thin week for content and new releases! Hopefully that means y’all are having some summer fun and enjoying life away from computer screens. I know I’ve been enjoying my time in the sun.

That’s my take on the week, but what’s yours?

What did I miss? What made you nod along (or πŸ™„)? Hit reply if you’re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen

Join the Serverless Picks of the Week Newsletter

Stay up to date with the best content serverless has to offer, learn about the latest updates to AWS serverless services, and get to know community superheroes, catered by AWS Serverless Hero Allen Helton. New issue every Monday.
Click here to see past issues.

Join the Serverless Picks of the Week Newsletter

Thank you for subscribing!
View past issues.