🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Avi Press, founder and CEO of Scarf. Avi focuses on helping open-source maintainers better understand how their software is used while connecting them with the organizations relying on their work. He has long been active in the open-source ecosystem as a tool builder and community contributor. He also serves on the board of the Haskell Foundation, advocating for stronger support systems around the people maintaining critical infrastructure in the software world. If you care about the future of open source and the builders who keep it running, Avi is someone worth following. Thank you so much for everything you do, Avi!
💯 Spotlight
I really enjoy “Day 2” articles, aka articles that talk about the real problems with software outside of actually building it. Daniele Frasca gave us a dose of this in his blog from last week where he talked about trust in the architecture. What I like is that he doesn’t talk about code at all. Instead, he talks about what you need to consider when taking an application to global scale. Hard questions that blog posts don’t mention and we don’t say out loud unless we have to. Sometimes, the most powerful kind of content is the kind that makes you aware of the things you should be thinking about. This one nails it.
🔥 My Favorite Content
We continue to see more articles of developers migrating off hosting services in favor of building their own, nuanced platform (very much like what we talked about at length last week). This time, Darryl Ruggles shared his story of building his new platform that comes full of rich features like newsletter support, analytics, and nice dev tooling for content creation. His article is much more than touting the cool features of his personal site, it’s also a reminder of how to be successful with coding agents and specific tips Darryl used to move quickly with accuracy. This trend leaves me wondering about the longevity of developer-focused sites like Hashnode and dev.to 🤔
Postman v12, also known as “the new Postman,” was released last week. I’m sure y’all know I’ve been a big advocate of Postman for years, and seeing this update was exactly what my developer heart wanted. It has basically turned into an API-focused flavor of VSCode. It has native git support, built-in agents trained on API design, and integrated CI/local dev support rolled up into one. I wrote about my recent experience with it and how I’m using it paired with Codex to build fast with the confidence I’m not breaking backward compatibility. My dev process has actually fundamentally changed and I’m loving it.
I get emails at least once a month telling me I have Lambda functions I deployed years ago in my account that are running on deprecated runtimes. While it would have been an easy upgrade years ago, some of these are skipping multiple versions, and I’ve been dragging my feet so long I’m scared to touch them. But a recent blog from Venugopalan Vasudevan and Gokul Sarangaraju might have that problem fixed. Their post tells us how to automate runtime updates with AWS Transform custom. Not only does it swap the runtime versions, but it uses an AI agent to update your code, dependencies, and potentially anything in the IaC. This is extremely clever and a huge burden off of engineering teams. Very, very cool!
I don’t know how to classify this next one. It’s part blog, part dev docs, part white paper? Anyway, it’s from Samantha He and is a great detailed look behind a multi-agent architecture that classifies multimodal data. It specifically shows you how to build it with GCP services, but the architecture and things to consider would be the same no matter what you build on. I’ll be honest, I like this format a lot. It’s a great example of “a picture says 1,000 words,” which goes even further when we’re talking about enterprise agent design.
💡 Tip of the Week
If you haven’t tried OpenClaw yet, I highly recommend it. It’s your own personal assistant that runs on its own machine and helps with whatever you need help with. I’ve been using it myself and feel like it’s changed how I think about side projects. Morgan Willis reminded us that AWS recently made it dirt simple to 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.
In a huge win for security around AI agents, Policy in Bedrock AgentCore is now GA. Policy gives you centralized controls for agent <> tool interactions that operates outside of your code.
Lambda Durable Functions has now made it into a Kiro power. Pretty nice for building long-running workflows!
Last Words
I’m beginning to see CFPs pop up and people sharing genuinely interesting talks they’re preparing for this year. Are you giving any talks? What are they going to be about? I’m seeing a good balance of both pragmatic AI and deep systems talks recently.
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