🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Damien Jones, AWS Consultant at Steamhaus, AWS Community Builder, AND User Group Leader. Damien is a legend in the community and has been creating content for years on his blog, speaking on podcasts, and giving conference talks. He’s also newly accepted in the AWS New Voices program, so I’d expect to be hearing more from him in the near future. Congrats on everything Damien, and thank you for all you do!
💯 Spotlight
I always admire the work Michael Walmsley does. He tends to see things a little bit differently than the rest of us and because of it, we all benefit. Last week, he published an article about some work he did that teaches AI agents when (and when not) to use tools. He explains that we have wonderful capabilities in skills and MCP tools that tell an agent how and what to do, but not so much when. His blog recounts his process of getting a self-improving agent to write its own tools and create instructions for when to use them effectively.
🔥 My Favorite Content
A few weeks ago, AWS launched S3 Files as a long-awaited feature to let buckets be mounted as file systems. I was immediately intrigued, but haven’t had the time yet to try it out myself. Luckily for me, Darryl Ruggles has done a lot of the exploratory work, and wrote up a detailed article on everything you need to know about using S3 Files with Lambda. He shows you how easy it is to manipulate files, points out the “download-process-upload” days are gone, gives you IaC for a quick try-it-yourself, and offers some things to look out for when you get hands on. Darryl has been doing a phenomenal job with these write ups on several major releases from AWS lately. Be sure to check out his site if you haven’t already!
Lee Gilmore continued building Study From Experts in public with his article last week on event-driven closed captions with AWS Transcribe. It’s a great article that shows you exactly how to get videos transcribed automatically, then having the transcription embedded in the content as captions. He also includes simple tricks to improve the outcomes of these services. Genuinely cool post.
Y’all know I’m a sucker for agentic architecture pieces. That’s exactly what Omid Eidivandi gave us last week, this time with an enterprise AWS flair. This post is more about reframing how we do design, stating many things we’re used to are designed for human developers, not AI agents. He also gets into why your OpenAPI specs need to mean something to a model and that enterprise glossaries are of utmost importance again (be still my beating heart).
💡 Tip of the Week
So, turns out while I was adding some new features to this newsletter service, I broke the ability to subscribe to it 😬. I shared the short story on LinkedIn last week with a PSA to lean into integration tests. Don’t just stop at unit tests!
🐣 New Releases
Reminder, all releases from AWS can be found on AWS News by Luc van Donkersgoed. Below are my favorite from last week.
CloudFront launched WebSocket support for VPC Origins, letting you get direct connections all the way to your private subnets. Think about the engineering that went into this. Crazy.
Lambda now supports Ruby 4.0 as a managed runtime. This is the first Ruby runtime update we’ve seen in over a year.
AgentCore Runtime now supports Node.js for direct code deployment. So just bundle everything in a zip, upload to S3, and point the runtime at it. Nice.
Amazon Q Developer will be sunset in April, 2027 in favor of Kiro. I think we all saw this one coming and are happy for it.
Last Words
As we get more and more used to AI being in our workflows, I’m noticing habits change and decisions like programming languages become a quick “let’s just use X.” Have you found yourself using new-to-you programming languages based on the projects you’re building? Like Rust for latency sensitive apps or Python for AI heavy workloads? Curious if y’all are sticking with the tried and true or if you’re making changes because it’s so easy.
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