🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Diana Pham, developer advocate at Vonage, Appwrite Hero, and Digital Ocean Chapter Leader. Diana is a phenomenal speaker known for her unique blend of technical insight and creative storytelling. She has an incredible range of knowledge, with talks covering everything from CI/CD pipelines to DEI in tech, to Kubernetes (😬). Thank you for being an inspiration to the community and for all of your selfless work, Diana!

💯 Spotlight

My absolute favorite piece of content last week was not serverless related. Or AI. Heck, it’s not really even about software (it’s my newsletter, I’m allowed to do this 😃). The article is titled ‘No, you don’t want to hire “the best engineers”’ by Rachel Wolford and is a brilliant piece of writing. The viewpoint is from a recruiter talking to an HR/startup founder audience, but I think many of us can read this with a lens of self-reflection. Give this a read and see if you would consider yourself one of the “best engineers.” If yes, does this validate you or justify your thoughts? If no, is that something you’d aspire to be?

🔥 My Favorite Content

I’m intrigued by S3 vector store. From what I hear about it, it’s an inexpensive way to store and query vectors natively inside of AWS. Davide De Sio wrote an article on it last week on his experience with it while in preview. It’s mostly about getting setup through the AWS console since there’s no IaC support yet (previews, am I right?!) and how it seamlessly integrates with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. I totally agree with his statement, “now is the perfect time to experiment and get familiar with S3 Vectors” so you can be up and running as soon as it goes GA.

A couple of weeks ago I had what I thought was a great idea - why don’t I build a prototype that’s visually stunning in v0 then move the code to Kiro to “productionize” it? That would play to the strengths of both agentic code builders. Well, Andres Moreno and I tried that out on a live stream last week. Long story short - it did not work. At all. It’s worth a watch though to see why it failed so badly and to get our speculation about where the industry is at right now.

Agents aren’t just for code building! This is something I feel the tech community is unfairly type-casting AI agents with right now. AWS Serverless Office Hours last week had a session on building serverless agentic apps, which serves as a baseline primer for getting out of the mindset that agents are only for coding. This session gives a demo of what an AI agent could do and it shows you how to build them in AWS. I like the discussion on AgentCore in the video, where it had some clarifications on the service I was unclear about.

Keeping on AI agent building, I wrote a post more targeted toward the fundamentals of enterprise agent design. There are plenty of conversations going on about all sides of agent development, but surprisingly few on infrastructure and the core components of agents. Specifically my post is about agent communication, memory, and code execution and the different types of each. Full disclosure, it does talk about how Momento fits into the ecosystem a fair bit, but honestly it fits really well. I’m about to start on a big enterprise AI agent campaign in the Believe in Serverless community that addresses how to build production-ready enterprise agents that solve business problems other than coding.

💡 Tip of the Week

Another not-serverless-or-AI-related tip for us this week comes from Harun Rayhan where he reminds us about an incredibly important life skill we learn too late in life.

Knowing when to say "no" and when to say "yes" is a superpower.

Saying "no" doesn't make you a bad person. Also, preparing yourself to say "yes" the right way is not easy.

— Harun R. (@HarunRRayhan) September 5, 2025

Last Words

A discussion I had several times at the AWS Hero Summit a couple of weeks ago was “what happened to all the content?” You might have noticed this newsletter be a little light on content lately. I have a few speculations.

1. It’s just that time of year.
2. Nothing “new and exciting” has come out in serverless for a while
3. We’re moving to video, specifically short-form, for content these days
4. There’s so much GenAI generated content out there - and I’ve said I don’t reshare that type of content

What do y’all think? Is there another type of content you’d like to see me share? Where are your interests right now? Anything I can do to help make this newsletter better for you, I’m all ears.

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