🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Bhuvaneswari Subramani, Chief Cloud Evangelist at Intuitive.Cloud and AWS Hero. Bhuvaneswari is a powerhouse of knowledge and generosity in the tech community, leading by example through mentorship, advocacy, and deep technical expertise. From championing women in tech to driving innovation in cloud and DevOps, she boosts everyone around her with her energy and authenticity. Thank you for inspiring us all to build boldly and inclusively, Bhuvaneswari!

💯 Spotlight

Most of what Cloudflare does seems like magic to me. One of the components that has always felt extra magical is Durable Objects. I knew they had/managed/are serverless state, but really didn’t know how that was pulled off. Luckily for all of us, Boris Tane gave us the best look at Durable Objects I’ve seen to date. He explains them incredibly well, giving real-world patterns, helpful diagrams, and an ELI5. Thank you for this, Boris!

🔥 My Favorite Content

I saw a very cool podcast episode from Johannes Koch last week where he was interviewing Lou Bichard about an app Lou and his team have been working on called Ona. Ona, formerly Gitpod, is a pretty neat cloud-based agentic code editor, and from the looks of it, does a lot right. Looks like I have a new weekend project.

In part 5 of our AI agent design principles series, Andres Moreno and I did a live stream last week going over meta-agents. These are agents that act as output guardrails that do things like policy verification, topic control, and quality checks - a must have for production-grade agents. We cover how to build them, how they differ from multi-agent collaboration, and show how they work in image generation workflows. This was a fun one!

I love the casual tone, simple mindset, and deep technical understanding in a post from Thomas Ptacek last week called “You should write an agent.” It encourages you to stop reading and watching content about agents and go try it yourself because honestly - it’s really easy. But clearly Thomas knows what he’s talking about. He makes astute observations on MCP in general, building bespoke things, and where to prioritize your tinkering. I feel totally validated because it aligns with what I’ve been saying on my streams the past few months 😅. Wonderful article!

Many of you are builders with plenty of ideas for that one SaaS that could “totally take off,” myself included. I found a post (I think it’s a post) from the founder of hehestreams talking about the lessons he learned growing a B2C app. Even though he built a piracy website and was eventually arrested for it, the lessons directly apply to builders everywhere and I see a lot of value in what he shared. It’s weird because he business was illegal, but his lessons weren’t. Good read.

💡 Tip of the Week

I don’t know if I’ve ever met a developer who enjoys daily stand-ups, yet we all do them. Has anyone tried and had success with async stand-ups? Do you guys think we still need them at all? This was a funny post poking fun at how stand-up meets hyperbolize over time without anyone realizing it.

🐣 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!

There are lots of feature releases being announced every day, so I’ll keep it light with a couple of my favorites.

AgentCore Runtime now supports direct code deployment. Now you can upload a zip file straight to the runtime for faster dev cycles.

Amazon Cognito removes M2M app client price dimension. This was controversial when they added the price dimension a while back, it’s nice to see them go back on it.

Last Words

AWS re:Invent is coming fast! Who am I going to see there?

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