🦸 Community Superhero
Our community superhero this week is Anna Pastushko, Solutions Architect at Intellias and AWS Community Builder. Anna has done some tremendous open source work, opening her entire portfolio to the public as well as sharing her thoughts through blogging and content creation. She’s also the author of the Clarity byDesign newsletter, which is a wonderfully written bi-weekly newsletter about designing systems in the AI era. Thank you so much for everything you do, Anna!
💯 Spotlight
I had a full-circle moment last week when I read Pubudu Jayawardana’s post about using Lambda MicroVMs for virus scanning. Years ago, I tried to run ClamAV in Lambda and it was slower than molasses, but relatively cheap. So my team and I ported it over to ECS and it ran lightning fast, but much more expensive and sometimes ran with stale virus definitions. But as Pubudu points out, we now have the best of both worlds. With MicroVMs, you get the scalability and costs of Lambda, but the performance of a long-lived container. He also shares how to keep the virus definitions up-to-date, which is probably the most important part of the entire article now that I think about it. 😅 Great article, and it even includes the source code!
🔥 My Favorite Content
AWS recently announced AWS Blocks which is marketed as a toolkit for building full-stack applications on AWS. This might be underselling the capabilities a bit, but also might be a little misleading. Avinash Dalvi wrote up his thoughts on it last week, helping readers determine whether it fits their product or not. He goes through both the good and the bad from his perspective and calls out a few gotchas as well. Side note - I had a loooong conversation with the PM of Blocks last week at the Hero Summit. We might see some repositioning updates soon that closer aligns to what they actually want it to be.
And speaking of the Hero Summit, it was so interesting to see what was on everybody’s mind, both from a Hero and an AWS perspective. A conversation I had a dozen times was about how much the engineering discipline is changing. I was going to write a blog post about it, but Johannes Koch beat me to it. His angle on the topic is the phases of agentic support, which does a great job at identifying the progression many of us have gone through (and what many of us will go through). I like his take at pointing out the objective ways engineering is changing.
AWS launched DynamoDB vectors last week, an exciting enhancement on top of the already monumental service. Leonid Koren and Mo Kamioner wrote a blog that shows you how to build semantic search with it, but more importantly digs into the details around it, like non-obvious things to know, how it’s metered and how to optimize cost, and some use cases to get the ideas flowing. Pretty cool overall! This should simplify a lot of systems going forward.
💡 Tip of the Week
In a throw that felt straight out of “Mean Girls”, Milos Colic weighed in last week on an article titled “Don’t be a meat proxy.” His general message is to stop dumping messages straight from Claude or ChatGPT into PRs or threads with your friends. They have access to those LLMs too, they don’t need you to do it for them. By doing a response dump like that, you’re effectively asking others to do the work you didn’t want to do. I completely agree with this mentality, I’m curious how y’all feel about it.
Last Words
That’s it for this week, short and sweet but important! I look forward to continue watching how things develop in our industry and how AWS and the other hyperscalers adapt to a radically changing paradigm.
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