🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is David Hérault, full stack engineer at Cactos and the creator and maintainer of serverless-offline. If you’ve ever run a Serverless Framework project, you’ve run his code. He runs it (and several other open source projects) for the community, openly asking for co-maintainers and merging the fixes people send in. People like David keep our dev loops running as fast as possible. Thank you so much for everything you do, David!

💯 Spotlight

The spotlight this week goes to one of my favorite builders, Jimmy Dahlqvist. Jimmy always builds cool automations and does an exceptional job explaining the workflows and technical reasoning behind what he does. Last week, he published an article about how he uses an AI agent to determine recommended articles on his blog. When I read the title, I thought it might be a bit overkill because you can get that functionality out of a vector search. But fortunately for me, Jimmy proved me very wrong with his reasoning and A++ design skills. His setup uses Lambda Durable Functions, AgentCore, and MongoDB Atlas for all the heavy lifting. Probably my favorite part of this is how he built the human-in-the-loop piece. At the end of his workflow, he gets a PR in GitHub with the suggested related posts and the reasoning for the choice. Extremely cool!!!

🔥 My Favorite Content

Nothing makes me happier than seeing a builder tackle a problem they’re having head on. Kiro hit 1.0 last week, and the upgrade changed the hook format, marking all existing hooks as inactive. Davide De Sio ran right into it, because his open source tool KiroGraph leans on those hooks to keep a local code graph in sync. Instead of hand-editing a pile of files, he published how he fixed it with a single prompt. This is a nice short article about how he solved a problem, but I want you to takeaway a different, understated lesson from it. Migrations like this used to take hours of time and intentional capacity in dev sprints. But thinking smartly with the tools we have now, things like breaking changes can end up being a minor inconvenience if you know what you’re looking for (just don’t start pushing breaking changes to your APIs 😅).

Last week, AWS announced S3 annotations which allows you to add queryable context to your S3 objects instead of using a database like DynamoDB. Kento Ikeda wrote the post digging into the theory of where object metadata should live, which I found to be an interesting read with some good insights. As with everything, annotations has its tradeoffs, and Kento does a good job listing them out. While this was clearly written by an LLM 🤖, the content is meaningful and is worth the read.

Google has been on fire lately proposing new protocols in the agentic AI era. Just last week they proposed the Open Knowledge Format and the Agentic Resource Discovery specification to standardize operations in our chaotic landscape. Amit Kayal wrote a blog post last week explaining why the Open Knowledge Format is so important for enterprise agents with just about everything you need to know. It’s a bit long, but it covers everything from generating the format from SQL/NoSQL DBs, how it fits into agentic frameworks, and measuring success with this format. This one again is clearly written by an LLM 🤖, but has solid subject matter in it.

Shifting over to a more technical and performance related topic, Lee Harding did some neat exploratory work on the latency of Lambda vs Step Functions. For relatively simple operations that can be done in JSONata, it would appear that Step Functions has more consistent performance than Lambda. Note - this doesn’t always mean faster, but consistent, like when you care about tail latencies. He also has a VERY interesting discovery about the ongoing performance of Step Functions that I don’t want to spoil here, it’s well worth the read.

💡 Tip of the Week

I have a lot of respect for Addy Osmani and his work. In a post last week announcing his departure from Google, he shares some invaluable lessons for engineers from his 14 years there. There’s a lot of wisdom in these words.

Last Words

Unfortunately it seems like we aren’t going to escape a heavy LLM-generated content world any time in the near future. As I read article after article, many of them seem to be converging on the same voice, the same format, and the same feel. The subject matter in many of them is genuinely good, so I’ll continue sharing them. But starting next week I’ll be adding flair onto my shared articles clearly indicating robot voice. This is my passive-aggressive reminder to show your personality people! Teach us what you learned in your voice, not in generic Claude-isms.

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