🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Jordan González Bustamante, Senior Software Engineer at Datadog and AWS Community Builder. I got the pleasure of meeting Jordan last week at re:Invent and am just as impressed at his knowledge as I am his willingness to help others. He shares his learnings on his website and on social media as well - be sure to check him out! Thank you for everything you do, Jordan!

💯 Spotlight

Have you ever wondered how webhooks work? Many discussions I’ve had with developers the past several years have led me to believe that many people think they know what they are, but are actually shrouded in confusion. Luckily for us, Lee Gilmore published a phenomenal article explaining everying (yes, actually everything) about webhooks. What they are, why you need them, who uses them, how to build them, best practices, and security. This is the new best piece of content on webhooks. Great job, Lee!

🔥 My Favorite Content

AWS has been doing a great job demonstrating how to use their MCP servers. Last week was no exception as Galib Sarayev showed us how to build a full-stack application with Amplify using AWS MCP. We’ve seen articles with that title before, but this one is different - it talks about the new SOPs (standard operating procedures) baked into the AWS MCP server. This one explains what they are and what SOPs are available for Amplify, then shows how to configure and use them in Kiro. This is much less about actually building as it is explaining what and how to do it. It’s a great article to equip yourself with the right tools.

And speaking of Kiro, it had quite the week last week! First, they introduced Kiro Powers, which feels similar to a “development profile” for Kiro. You activate a power and it’s given MCP servers and steering docs to get it to perform a specific way. Love this idea and am fully on board with using it for targeted use cases (I was even a launch partner for it, I made a SaaS Builder power). And on top of powers, the Kiro autonomous agent was launched, which is an AI coding agent that runs in its own sandbox, allowing you to be hands free while your product is developed. Super cool stuff coming from this team!

In a short-but-sweet post, Robert Slootjes showed us how to set an SQS fair queue as a target of an EventBridge rule. There’s not much more to this than the infrastructure as code, and it looks about as you’d expect. But sometimes it’s things like this that you have to see before you really “get it” and start using it.

Last week was my 5th year at re:Invent, but my first one giving a talk! Gunnar Grosch and I spoke about multi-agent collaboration with A2A, and went into detail about the agent loop, how A2A enhances it, and go through a couple of demos showing the flexibility of it. We tie multi-agent collaboration to a microservices architecture, going over how they parallel and what behaviors are shared between both of them. I’m a big fan of A2A, and definitely recommend giving this video a watch.

💡 Tip of the Week

I thought Eduardo Ordax shared a clever comic on LinkedIn last week. While we’ve seen this in many forms, it seems especially true with AI. We have so many AI “thought leaders” who have never touched code, it makes the landscape a little scary. This post was also very timely - motivation should be high after re:Invent to get in there and try something yourself… Do it!

🐣 New Releases

It would be impossible for me to list all the releases from re:Invent last week, so here are my top 5 announcements I’m most excited about. Check out AWS News for the full list with helpful summaries.

You can now build multi-step applications directly in Lambda with durable functions. Think of this as code-based Step Functions! Currently available for Python 3.13/3.14 and Node.js 22/24.

Strands Agents SDK now supports TypeScript. I’ve been waiting for this one - Strands Agents seems to be one of the easiest ways to build agents and now you can do it in JavaScript.

S3 Vectors went generally available and has 40x the scale than it did in preview. It’s also now available in 14 AWS regions.

AWS released a Security Agent and DevOps Agent for proactive monitoring and operational excellence in your account. These both help you build higher-scale, higher-quality, applications and even help with with faster triage time and path to resolution during incidents.

Lambda on EC2? Yes! With Lambda Managed Instances you can run functions on specialized hardware with high-bandwidth networking if your workload needs it. Offering a solid answer to “Lambda is expensive at scale,” this new feature is perfect for people with steady-state traffic.

Last Words

I had so much fun at re:Invent last week - from the hackathon on a bus to giving my first talk at re:Invent to seeing all my friends (and many new ones) - I won’t soon forget it. Be on the look out for re:Invent recaps coming out likely for the next few months. Personally, I’m going to start digging in on durable functions. I’m intrigued by this and think it will help simplify a lot of things.

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