🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Bekah Hawrot Weigel, senior developer advocate at Continue, creator of the Virtual Coffee community, and all-around inspiring human being. Bekah has fostered one of the most supportive developer communities around, which speaks wonders about her as a person. Her career shift from college English instructor to advocating for DX has left a significant impact on the community. Thank you SO MUCH for everything you do, Bekah!

💯 Spotlight

As many of you probably heard, AWS and Amazon laid off 16,000 employees last week including two legends in the AWS Community Ross Barich and Jason Dunn. If you can, reach out to your contacts at AWS and see who is looking for something new. Help them any way you can - write recommendations on LinkedIn, pass resumes and CVs to recruiters you know, or anything else you can think of that moves the needle toward getting them placed again. Let’s pull together to help however we can.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Last week Lee Harding shared a post that checks all the developer bingo boxes. Simple software that solves a real problem? Check. Built a custom hardware device for fun? Check. Uses an uncommon protocol because it satisfies the need better than others? Check. Expert-level comprehension and explanation? Also check! His article goes over how he built a real-time Hacker News display for $15 and is a genuinely fascinating read. He explains all the hardware he used to build the display, tells us why UDP is his choice for IoT devices, and explains how he communicates securely. I love this, it’s so motivating to go out and do something like this yourself.

I have mixed opinions on an article from Firdaws Aboulaye about choosing the right LLM for internationalization. While it is clearly written by an LLM in formatting and structure, it actually has solid advice in there. It recommends batching small, repetitive tasks to save on system prompt token usage, and also hints at chain of draft prompting without saying those words. The lessons in here apply to way more use cases than just i18n, so it’s worth the read.

You know how I keep sharing articles every week about how AI is moving to the edge this year and we can expect on-device models to be mainstream in the not-too-distant future? Well, Sarah Chen validated me last week with an impressively thorough writeup on the edge AI computing revolution. This article goes through the advancements of LLMs that makes them capable of being deployed onto something like a smart phone, talks about the adoption of edge AI with IoT devices, and gives a solid guess on what we’ll be able to do with these advancements. It’s important, people! Things are happening!

I found an article last week from Ricky Nelson that felt a little too familiar. He wrote about an app he made called FlashReel, which is a web app for content creators to repurpose video content. His app takes a long video, transcribes it, then splits it up into clips that pull out the best moments. It even writes all the YouTube metadata and generates thumbnails for you! This is more of a product announcement than it is technical deep dive, but it is a cool write up. The reason it felt so familiar is that Andres Moreno and I are working on basically the same thing, but an open-source version. And we’re talking with Julian Wood on Serverless Office Hours about it next week 🙂

💡 Tip of the Week

We got some solid advice from Addy Osmani, director at Google Cloud AI, on vibe coding last week. He’s responding to a funny X post on vibe coding (that honestly is not different than “traditional programming’s” quick fix) and gives grounding advice for the very real responsibilities we still have as software engineers.

🐣 New Releases

Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.

Amazon Bedrock supports a 1-hour prompt caching duration now, up from 5 minutes. This is a configurable value if your caching requirements are tighter than an hour.

The AWS MCP server now includes deployment Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). This will provide structured guidance on deployment operations for complex builds.

EventBridge, Lambda, and SQS all now support up to 1MB payloads. This has been a long time coming and I’m guessing Durable Functions was probably the linchpin that got this work done.

Last Words

I am deeply saddened by the layoffs across our industry. Just in January alone, we’ve seen 25,337 reported layoffs. I’ve been fortunate enough to have never gone through it myself, and I can’t imagine the feeling of shock going through so many people’s heads. So please help if you can. Every little bit helps, even if it’s just an introduction.

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