🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, the Berlin-based company behind spaCy and a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation. She is an amazing keynote speaker, and has been making the rounds with her talk The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized, which makes the case that open source still beats economies of scale, even for LLMs. Thank you Ines, for being so inspirational and for your selfless contributions to the community!

💯 Spotlight

Cloudflare published a masterful blog post last week on a systems-level engineering problem they had with their analytics system. They changed the way they partitioned data and that caused a massive bottleneck in their billing jobs. The article is about the steps they took to triage and fix it, and it’s full of the technical goodness you expect from Cloudflare. Get cozy for a solid data-heavy read by James Morrison and Christian Endres.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Retries in distributed systems can be hard to reason about. They can be even trickier when they’re used with Lambda Durable Functions that also have a replay mechanic. So what’s the difference and how do they work? Rishi Tiwari did a thoughtful experiment last week that answers that question, and specifically aims to explain the difference between atMostOncePerRetry and atLeastOncePerRetry strategies. He runs through four different scenarios, carefully documenting exactly what happens in each one. Great write up!

Avi Keinan shared a short read last week about an AWS quirk he discovered with Route53 and CloudFront. Apparently the two play off each other, and if you have a domain name attached to a free CloudFront distribution, it lowers your limits for number of records you can configure down from 10,000 to 50! Avi shows you how he solved the problem and how you can do it yourself. Very useful walkthrough if you run into this yourself.

I love how creative developers are. Jérôme Guyon published an article last week talking about how he extended the boto3 client to control AWS CloudShell. Jérôme discovered that CloudShell uses an undocumented REST API when you use it in the console that authenticates with AWS Sigv4. So he created a JSON service model for it, injected it into the botocore loader, and he was off to the races. I can see how this could make a huge impact on daily work if you’re a heavy CloudShell user.

I have been working on a local AI agent to act as my on-call and triage developer for my side projects. A couple of months ago I published an article talking about how excited I was about it, but I’m smarter now. 2 months is like 2 years in AI years 😛. I’m now of the opinion that local agents should be avoided in favor of a more secure runtime. I published a follow-up article explaining four attack vectors for local agents and how seemingly honest code can be hijacked by either malicious code or bad reasoning. Stay safe out there!

💡 Tip of the Week

I saw pigs fly last week. Sandro Volpicella told a short story on LinkedIn about how he built an AI agent to parse through and reason about CloudWatch logs. Now he doesn’t open the AWS console at all. This is coming from the guy that literally wrote The CloudWatch Book! You want to talk about AI enabling things we never saw coming, look right here.

Last Words

I continue to see more and more layoffs from tech companies this year and it saddens me to no end. If you need help finding another job, reach out. I’ll do whatever I can to connect you with people who are hiring. And stay present in the community! The old adage of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” couldn’t be more true.

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