🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Beau Carnes, director of technology education at freeCodeCamp. Beau is a shining example of selfless knowledge-sharing with the community, as he’s made countless programming tutorials and courses (all for free) for years. He has helped thousands of developers continue to grow with his expertly-made content and understanding of computer science topics. Thank you for everything you do, Beau!

💯 Spotlight

I’ve always been a fan of Boris Tane’s thought processes. Last week, he shared a blog/website(?) making a case to ship types, not docs. He argues that since your API docs will always get out of sync with the code, it’s best to deploy packages with unambiguous schemas that actually execute business actions. Boris goes on to state that with the rise in agentic coding, this is more relevant than ever - as agents are much more likely to be successful with type-driven SDKs than they are using a fetch MCP server to read possibly stale docs. I like the way he reframes how we approach this. Great food for thought!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Times are changing in the serverless world. Where we once had a “single-responsibility Lambda function” principle that was hotly debated, we’ve kinda relaxed the reigns on it a bit. In fact, Elias Brange is pushing the boundaries so much that he’s even consolidating event handlers into a single function. Elias’s post shares an npm package he made that makes it dirt simple to wire up a shared event handler just like you would an API controller in Lambda. It’s a great idea and even better execution. Curious on the community’s thoughts on this topic!

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a detailed “clean architecture” post that shows you how to write your business logic in a way that doesn’t lock you in to a cloud vendor. Elena van Engelen-Maslova broke the silence with a fantastic article on keeping your code portable, and shows specifics about how you’d lay it out for both Azure Functions and AWS Lambda. With the rising appetite of multi-cloud, this is extremely timely and a great lesson in how to design long-lived code.

By now, most of us are using AI in one way, shape, or form when it comes to development. While this is a good thing, it’s also potentially a bad thing if you’re beginning to integrate it into your day job. Ran Isenberg shared a great article last week on the AI software development lifecycle and how we quickly run into chaos if everyone starts hammering away at a code base without defining standards and putting governance in place. Ran covers all the bases, like how traditional SDLC falls short in today’s world, how we can integrate AI into every phase of the SDLC, and how you can start putting a cohesive and safe model together at work. Great insights here.

As projects grow, their complexity tends to grow exponentially. I remember a time when my team had accidentally gotten ourselves into a circular dependency with some of our microservices that made it next to impossible to deploy into new regions. I know I’m not the only one this has happened to. To combat this, Tycko Franklin follows a central register pattern for resource sharing which scales a bit better than standard export/import of values. His post shows how he registers and consumes Lambda functions in CDK without getting into a dependency nightmare. It’s a really informative read for anyone out there with growing systems.

💡 Tip of the Week

Our friend Dave Hall has been hard at work building an open-source ticket router for Zendesk. Last week, he shared the code and a full write-up on what/why/how he made it. If you’re a Zendesk user, you should absolutely give this a look!

🐣 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 CloudFront launched mutual TLS support for origins, which allows you to verify that requests going to your origin servers come only from authorized distributions. This greatly simplifies request verification!

DynamoDB global tables now support replication across multiple AWS accounts. So now you can have multi-region AND multi-account redundancy!

Amazon Bedrock supports structured outputs now. This allows you to guarantee shape in the response from an LLM instead of requiring you to parse, validate, and hope (or rely on tools solely for the output). Just in time for Clause Opus 4.6 support.

Last Words

Wow, what a range of topics last week! I saw a surge in content that I haven’t seen for months, I guess February is a month of motivation? Do you feel the same way? There are lots of hackathons popping up, are you working on something on the side and want to share? Let me know!

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