🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer and tech community legend. Gergely has been a staple for developer education for years, and recently held his first conference supporting over 500 attendees and a best-in-class lineup of speakers. If you don’t already follow Gergely and subscribe to his newsletter, today’s the day. Thank you so much for everything you do, Gergely!

💯 Spotlight

I’ll start us off week with a rabbit-hole. I’m getting increasingly fascinated at using AI agents for operations instead of simply coding. I read this article about how Azure is building for agentic cloud operations by Pang Ngernsupaluck and it really got the gears turning in my head. While the post is mostly about how Copilot is changing and enabling new workloads, the concepts apply to any agent you can build yourself. My “aha” moment while reading this was not thinking of everything as isolated bots, but rather as one connected system with domain specialties 🤯

🔥 My Favorite Content

While we’re on the topic of agents, I stumbled upon a benchmark from Murat Aslan giving us a comparison of most of the popular AI coding agents. It compares seven different coding agents and gives them a rank, what they’re good at, where the risks are, security alerts, and trends. I found this pretty helpful as far as a “state of AI coding agents” goes, but had a hard time finding what to do with this information. It seems well-researched and offers good information though. Worth the read.

Danielle Heberling gave us an incredibly practical story last week where she tells us about how she let an AI agent job hunt for her. The article is less about the job hunt itself and more about how she built her agent and the lessons she learned along the way. I couldn’t agree more with Danielle’s messaging, and learned a thing or two as well - notably about Tavily. Thanks for sharing Danielle, and congrats on the new job!

If you aren’t following David Boyne’s journey with EventCatalog, you need to. So many developers think their side project just needs a little bit of tuning to turn it into SaaS, it will go viral, and they’ll be setup for life. Unfortunately, it’s not often that way - and Dave is living that live and telling us all about it. Last week he shared his thought process on bootstrapping his company vs trying to get funded and the real talk in there is as exciting as it is sobering. This story isn’t about tech in the sense that it will make you a better builder, but it is in the sense that it might make you happier.

For those of you who are trying to make that side project real, Lee Gilmore published an article that is more important than you might think. His post talks about custom email triggers in Cognito that include your branding. Few things throw trust out the window faster than a shady email from a vendor. Lee shows you how to avoid that trap, and tie into the Cognito lifecycle to send messages that look like they actually came from you.

💡 Tip of the Week

I know many of you out there are big CDK users, which is why the work Lee Priest is doing is so exciting. He’s working on a CDK Insights project that scans your code, finds any hidden issues, and offers suggestions for best practices. He just opened up a free beta program for an AI-enabled version, so give it a shot!

🐣 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 added six open weight models to its repertoire, including DeepSeek V3.2, MiniMax M2.1, GLM 4.7, GLM 4.7 Flash, Kimi K2.5, and Qwen3 Coder Next. I’ve even seen a few of these make their way into Kiro. These models are significantly less expensive to run, so they’re worth a shot.

Aurora DSQL is now available in four additional regions. It’s still not available everywhere, but the team is doing a fantastic job getting it rolled out.

S3 Tables can now add partition and sort order definitions on table creation. From what I gather, you had to do these separately after the table was created before. This is a nice user experience enhancement!

Last Words

I don’t know about any of y’all, but this is a busy time of year! I’m working in the garden, building fun hackathon projects, and feel dialed in at work. Feels like we’re in a stabilizing time of year where the motivation really hits and we get stuff done. With that said, please share your projects with me so I can help get the word out! I love reading your stories or offering advice on anything computer science.

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