🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Madelyn Olson, principal engineer at AWS and Valkey project maintainer. Madelyn is a brilliant individual, and has a remarkable way to explain complex systems and concepts in an approachable way. If you haven’t been keeping up with the innovation coming from Valkey recently, check it out and get a feel for the boundaries she’s pushing in low-level system design. Thank you for your incredible work, Madelyn!

💯 Spotlight

There is so much innovation in AI right now, we tend to lose sight of an important part of how it all works - the hardware. AI-specific datacenters are popping up all over the world that don’t pass the normal smell test for datacenters. These are different. Very different. Last week, Scott Guthrie shared a blog post about how the Azure AI superfactory was built and honestly - I had no idea this much nuance and intentional forethought went into something like this. As software people, we can take a minute to be inspired by the incredible engineering of the hardware guys. Extremely cool share!

🔥 My Favorite Content

It was cool to see Ky Pham hit the nail on the head last week as to why some developers have better success with AI coding assistants than others. His hypothesis is that we need a new lens when looking at AI usage - one that positions all developers as tech leads rather than individual contributors (ICs). He makes a compelling argument that feels spot on to me.

I found an article that was definitely completely written by AI, despite being attributed to a human. It poses the argument that companies are shifting from cloud to local AI inference. In a way, this makes a lot of sense - it would drastically reduce cost and be more secure (probably) than cloud offerings. While I don’t like content clearly written by AI, I like this thoroughly researched take on something that could be a bit of a paradigm shift for builders.

I stumbled upon a comic from Comic Strip Blogger last week that gave us a satirical look at our future if we continue to go all in on AI. The comic suggests that eventually everyone (not just software developers) will be replaced by robots and that they will give all humans a universal basic income so we can remain as consumers. Yikes 😬

And of course, we have a new set of AWS heroes! This small-but-mighty cohort introduces Dimple Vaghela, Rola Dali, and Vivek Velso as new community and machine learning heroes respectively. Congratulations to the three of you and thank you for everything you do!

💡 Tip of the Week

You might have seen a “backtrack” from Anthropic about MCP last week. It’s an interesting read that makes sense given how the industry has progressed. But it was a timely update for Patrick Kelly who announced his framework that follows what Anthropic was suggesting, and reduces token consumption by almost 99% 🤯

🐣 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!

We’re in the calm before the storm. We always have great announcements at re:Invent and I feel like AWS is backing off from their traditional “pre:Invent” releases because of some major updates coming. That said, here are a couple of cool releases from this past week.

EventBridge can now target SQS fair queues through EventBridge rules.

S3 tables now support CloudWatch metrics and tags. It’s good to see investment here.

Last Words

In two weeks, many of us will be at re:Invent! I hope to see you there. Send me a message if you want to do something or chat! And in case you missed it, I’m participating in a first-of-its-kind hackathon through AWS. 50 developers are going to be ushered onto some buses and will be driven from Las Angeles to Vegas on Sunday before re:Invent. This ~6 hour bus ride is all the time we’ll have to build something cool and get our presentations ready to share with the judges. And it’s going to be livestreamed!

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