🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Simon Willison, open source developer and prolific author. Simon has been an integral part of the tech community for decades, regularly publishing blog posts and sending newsletters about the latest and greatest. He just released his 2025 year of LLMs recap, identifying the many trends that came and went the past 12 months. Thank you for everything you do, Simon, and for sharing your thoughts and expertise!

💯 Spotlight

Hot take alert! David Linthicum wrote an article last week titled 2026: The year we stop trusting any single cloud with some grounded facts and polarizing opinions that honestly, make a lot of sense. His claim is that because of the major outages from hyperscale cloud providers last year, enterprises will start changing their behavior to do more multi-cloud or back to co-locating data for resiliency. Thinking as an enterprise architect, this makes perfect sense. We learned that these cloud providers aren’t bulletproof, and not all businesses can absorb the cost of a multi-hour outage like they can. I will be curious if we see the action he predicts next year or if we’ll just talk about disaster recovery more.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Every now and then a “back to basics” article catches me off guard and makes me say I didn’t know that was a thing! Which is exactly what happened with Anisat Ahmed’s post last week on using Amazon Transcribe to generate captions for video content. I had completely forgotten about this service and it seems to be becoming more and more relevant with the surge in popularity for video content. This article walks you through a (mostly AI generated) workflow that describes the inputs, outputs, and Python code you’d need to make it part of a media workflow. The content suggests a human-in-the-loop pattern to review generated captions, but I feel like there might be opportunity there for an AI agent to review them automatically and correct them when they make sense.

Another post that gets the gears turning in my head for what I can build in 2026 comes from Chandra Prakash Reddy about building voice agents with Amazon Nova Sonic. I feel like voice-to-voice modality like what Sonic provides is going to be a big reason for consumer adoption of generative AI. Skipping the typing and going straight to voice enables many people to use AI as if they were talking with a person. Regular interactions will help the fear many people NOT in tech have around it and act as a gateway into other use cases. Anyway, the article talks about voice-to-voice, use cases, and technical components of this modality. Give this a read to get some ideas for innovative new builds this coming year.

Over the years I’ve regularly published a blog post in early January stating my “word of the year.” But I don’t need to this year. Susana Melo did a better job than I ever could. Her word for 2026 is kindness, and I couldn’t agree more. Her post covers the gratitude for everything that went on in 2025, but also reminds readers that you never know what’s going on in someone’s life. It costs nothing to be kind and you make a world of difference to others when you do it.

💡 Tip of the Week

While I’m not usually one for vendor pitches, I like what Rick Houlihan said last week at its core. He is talking about not only developer experience, but developer expectations in 2026 with respect to data access and consistency. It’s a bit of a long post for social media, but his message rings loud and clear.

🐣 New Releases

Nothing new this week as the world rests and gears up for a new year.

Last Words

What are your new year’s resolutions? I’m still trying to decide on mine, but I know it’s going to revolve around helping others any way I can. I’d like to blog more, and I’m thinking about bringing the podcast back with a slightly new flair focused on builders. What do you think? Would you guys like something like that?

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