{"canonical":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/215/","categories":null,"contentText":"🦸 Community Superhero Our community superhero this week is Sonali Srivastava, senior developer advocate at Improving and co-chair of KubeCon India 2026. Sonali came back to tech through an Outreachy internship after a maternity break and now organizes the CNCF Women in Cloud Native group, advocating specifically for career returners, a group cloud-native keeps losing. Thank you Sonali, for building the path back for the people coming after you!\n💯 Spotlight One of my favorite developer \u0026ldquo;life hacks\u0026rdquo; is using middleware in my API controllers. There are so many libraries out there that hook into your code and basically do everything for you with little-to-no code. But what goes into writing middleware, you might wonder? Well, wonder no more, because Luciano Mammino published a blog last week on writing middleware for Rust Lambda functions. I can\u0026rsquo;t think of a more credible author for something like this, as Luciano was the original creator of Middy, a middleware engine you\u0026rsquo;ve probably used before without knowing it. Anyway - this is a great under-the-covers look at what it takes to build middleware, with the added complexity of doing it in Rust. Great write-up and super informative if you\u0026rsquo;re looking for something new.\n🔥 My Favorite Content Every time I see someone using AI to create music, my head explodes. Johannes Koch had Hector Zelaya on his show last week to talk about exactly this. Hector walks through how he uses Kiro outfitted with the Reaper MCP server to automate tasks in his music production workflow. It\u0026rsquo;s neat to see how he breaks down production into workable Kiro tasks and what it actually does to adjust things like gain and loudness in the music. And the music is really good! Hector said his first album is being released later this year, but you can get a sneak preview of a few songs on Spotify.\nLee Gilmore has been on fire recently. Not only has he been building Study From Exports in his spare time, he\u0026rsquo;s also been writing about it! He\u0026rsquo;s been working through creative processes that many of us have done at one point or another, but he\u0026rsquo;s one-upping us: he shares the code with easy explanations, justified reasoning, and helpful diagrams. Last week he shared a post about how he generates certificates of completion when users of his system finish a course. The workflow is event-driven, and uses Sharp and PDFKit to create official pictures and PDFs from his system. He even includes a little gotcha in there on custom fonts that has tripped me up a time or two. You don\u0026rsquo;t need to be building a course website for this to be practical - this blog is useful any time you have an event-driven workflow that needs photos generated.\nIf you use Claude Code, you\u0026rsquo;ll want to read Chris Ebert\u0026rsquo;s post from last week. He just attended Anthropic\u0026rsquo;s Code with Claude developer conference and wrote up a fantastic summary of what they are working on and his takeaways. We already knew that Anthropic is a leader in this space, but reading Chris\u0026rsquo;s notes solidly cements that for me. Between the expert insights on context windows and where engineering is bottlenecked now, to how AI engineering teams behave differently, I got lots of value from this. I also greatly appreciated Chris\u0026rsquo;s takeaways on what his focus areas are after the conference.\nShifting gears to more of a builder level, Yan Cui published a wonderful article on the inbox and outbox patterns. These are your typical event delivery patterns that you probably already know of, but do you know how to implement them or specifically why they are needed? Yan does a great job at answering both of those questions, and even goes so far as to highlight the difference between the inbox pattern and using idempotency keys. Love this - it\u0026rsquo;s cloud-native engineering at its core.\n💡 Tip of the Week I like where Dave Hall\u0026rsquo;s head is at with respect to returning to office. He correctly points out that we\u0026rsquo;re seeing more and more \u0026ldquo;hybrid\u0026rdquo; roles meaning 4 days a week in the office. Dave\u0026rsquo;s a smart guy and he has some solid words of wisdom in his post.\n🎉 Pick This Week's Favorite!\nYour vote helps shape next week's top pick.\nAI-generated music creation Middleware for Rust Lambda Automated certificate generation Inbox and outbox patterns Last Words After several weeks of analytics of this newsletter, it seems like y\u0026rsquo;all aren\u0026rsquo;t too interested in the New Releases section. So to keep this as helpful and engaging as possible, I\u0026rsquo;m taking it out and am looking to replace it with something else instead. If you have any ideas, please let me know what you\u0026rsquo;d like to see. My main goal here is to create something you enjoy week after week.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s my take on the week, but what\u0026rsquo;s yours?\nWhat did I miss? What made you nod along (or 🙄)? Hit reply if you\u0026rsquo;re reading the email. Prefer socials? Ping me on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.\nHappy coding!\nAllen\n","date":"2026-05-11T00:00:00Z","description":"Have you ever wanted to create your own music but felt a little overwhelmed? Just use AI!","image":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/images/newsletter.png","inLanguage":"en-US","lastmod":"2026-05-11T00:00:00Z","readingMinutes":4,"section":"newsletter","tags":null,"title":"Using AI to Create Music","url":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/215/","wordCount":837}