🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Rachel Stephens, research director at RedMonk. Rachel helps us think more carefully about the long-term impact of the systems we build. She blends technology, ethics, and sustainability, and consistently challenges our industry to slow down and ask better questions about scale, incentives, and responsibility. She brings a thoughtful, human lens to complex technical conversations and helps builders develop better judgment, a huge aspect to building better architectures. Thank you for the important work you do, Rachel!

💯 Spotlight

You may have heard a thing or two about AI agents over the past year. We went from ChatGPT being a fun chatbot to exploring MCP servers in Claude. Now the novelty has begun to wear off and enterprises are seriously investing in making autonomous agents part of their systems. Subramanya N posted a great article last week dissecting how we’re evolving, and gives real numbers and progressions to back it up. The article claims 2025 is the year agentic AI got real, and I’ll be honest - I’m convinced. It closes with a best guess of what we’re going to see next year. Exciting stuff!

🔥 My Favorite Content

2025 was a quiet year for me with blog posts. But I did manage to sneak one in last week that covered the project I made in the road to re:Invent hackathon. Full disclosure, it was my entire team who built it, not just me. But we did make a very funny project that was intentionally useless and overengineered. In the post, I go over five workflows we built to figure out “how many chickens you’ll have before they hatch” and what we would have done differently if we weren’t tasked with overengineering. It’s a fun article with signals to look out for when designing serverless systems.

Prince Kumar published an article explaining a production DLQ repair pipeline and I’m here for it. While the prose is a little strange, the diagrams and way it’s broken up offer some real gold. Focus on the segments and code samples for a genuinely solid way to handle failed data in your serverless systems.

In a fun builder adventure, Ben Subendran shared how he automatically bans hackers in his system. Ben walks through his build, which is essentially API Gateway to Lambda to update WAF with an IP address, and explains some of the gotchas he discovered along the way. While this reads like it was heavily assisted by an LLM, it’s still a fun little experiment that might get some ideas flowing in your head. These are the side projects I like reading about for inspiration.

💡 Tip of the Week

If I could like a post on LinkedIn 100 times, I would have done it for this one. Molly Sheets shared her 2026 lookahead, which talks about showing up for the people who care personally. Not just the social media interactions. Not the “happy birthday” texters. The ones who genuinely care and aim to be there for you. This is sound advice as we roll into the new year.

🐣 New Releases

It was a quiet week for launches, understandably so. While there were a dozen or so new features released last week, none of them hit the criteria for us in this newsletter. But if you’d like a list, check out AWS News by Luc van Donksersgoed.

Last Words

We did it. We made it another year. 2025 was a tough one for me. But I look forward to the year of the fire horse and making new waves and letting the light shine in. Thank you all for your ongoing support and friendship. Let’s keep paying it forward.

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