🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Paloma Lataliza, senior engineer at Caylent and AWS Community Hero. Paloma leads the AWS User Group in Minas Gerais, co-founded initiatives like Mulheres na Nuvem, and organizes events that bring hundreds of people together to learn and grow in the cloud. She’s a tireless advocate and mentor for women in tech, and an incredible educator and content creator. Her work enabling women in our field can’t be overstated - she really is a hero in our community. Thank you for everything you do, Paloma!

💯 Spotlight

Talent comes in many forms. But one I’m particularly fond of is the ability to make really, really hard problems seem approachable. This is exactly what Marc Brooker did last week in a talk for the Seattle Systems meetup group when he explained transactions and coordination in Aurora DSQL. If you want to understand how this incredible feat of engineering actually works (and you like dogs), check it out. It’s wonderful.

🔥 My Favorite Content

If you haven’t tried coding with an AI agent, it’s about time to give it a whirl. Don’t know where to start? Start with a quick primer from Udaya Veeramreddygari, who took the Believe in Serverless community through a fantastic explanation of how cloud-native app development is changing. Udaya explains the differences in team operations, how to use Cursor as a pair programmer, and even shows us what it could look like with a full team of autonomous AI agents working as your engineering staff! I love the grasp he has on these concepts and his comparisons between traditional, assisted, and autonomous programming.

Speaking of agentic coding, you might have heard whispers of a new entry into the market - Kiro (you’ve definitely heard of it if you’ve been a subscriber of this newsletter for a few weeks). Luciano Mammino and Eoin Shanaghy released an episode of the AWS Bites podcast last week talking about everything you need to know about Kiro. The duo have some great dialog covering their experiences with spec-driven development, early bugs they discovered, pricing, and whether or not they recommend switching over to it. It’s great first-hand storytelling that gives you the info you need from a trusted source.

If you like the thought of Kiro and are ready to see how it works, then the livestream that Andres Moreno and I did last week is your next stop. We give Kiro “the ol’ college try” and build a Battleship game with it, while explaining and building all of the cool new concepts it has, like steering docs, specs, and hooks. And since there has been a whole debacle with pricing and usage of requests, we made sure to monitor our usage dozens of times along the way. I’ll be honest - I’ve been very impressed with Kiro in my usage of it so far.

Stepping out of the world of agentic AI, we have a classic Lee Gilmore article that explains AWS CDK Blueprints vs Custom Constructs vs Aspects. Blueprints are a relatively new way to use property injection in your L2 constructs, which is a cool and less forceful way to get your teams to use your recommended settings for infra. Lee goes through all the choices you have now and gives you his thoughts on if/how he’s going to change some practices.

💡 Tip of the Week

I love it when the community comes together to amplify each other and important projects that benefit everybody. Shout out to Sandro Volpicella for boosting the request for comments from the Lambda PowerTools team on integrating OTel into their framework.

🐣 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!

Amazon Bedrock has simplified access to OpenAI open weight models by making them enabled by default in your accounts. They say they will be doing this with some other models in the near future as well!

Cloudflare Workers can now run Express.js apps, which greatly improves accessibility for many developers.

Last Words

Are you using AI agents for coding? Maybe for something else? With much of the content last week focusing in on enabling developers to move faster with agent assistance, it makes me wonder how many of us are actually doing it and with what kind of success. Let me know, I’m very interested!

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

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

Happy coding!

Allen