🦸 Community Superhero

Our community superhero this week is V. Thulisile Sibanda, developer evangelist at DevNetwork, OSS maintainer, community builder, and a genuinely inspiring human being. She’s been a part of the AsyncAPI initiative, helped mentor open source contributors, and run countless events. Thank you so much for everything you do for the community and for all of us in the tech industry!

💯 Spotlight

This week starts off with an existential crisis for many developers. Paul Dix published a terrifyingly titled post called the end of programming where he makes the claim that programming as we know it is on its way out the door. He does a surprisingly good job backing that claim up through numbers, a case study about Bun, and a couple of personal anecdotes. Paul understands there’s a bubble with all of this, but the creators inside the bubble are about to start building more high-quality production software than ever before. Fantastic read.

🔥 My Favorite Content

Paul mentions a couple of times in the spotlight that the new era of programming needs to emphasize more on QA and verification systems, but he doesn’t talk about what that means. Luckily, Luca Mezzarila published an article last week on basically exactly that. He frames the positioning from a you can’t govern what you can’t see perspective, but said another way, it’s a ridiculously strong verification system he uses with agentic coding. The article is super long, but worth it because he has great explanations and the breadth he covers is unrivaled. You could also skip straight to the code if you like.

I haven’t seen an article that is technically brilliant but also makes you go “why though” in quite some time. Colin Percival made me scratch my head last week wondering if his post on launching Route53 Files was satire or a real thing. Turns out it’s real, and it’s equally funny and crazy engineering work. He exposes a Route53 hosted zone over NFS, and lets you edit DNS records as if they were file system files. I love the creative energy, there’s actually a lot to the article, I recommend giving it a read.

While we’re talking about clever engineering, Benoit Boure released something he’s been working on called Asynkr, which is a native app for testing event-driven workflows in AWS. He calls it “Postman for EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, Step Functions, etc,” which is a good way to describe the capabilities. He also published a full video walkthrough of how to use it for those interested. We’ve seen several apps similar to this over the past few years, but this might be the first native app I’ve seen to do it. Pretty slick!

Shifting gears, I published an article last week reminding developers that DynamoDB Streams is not an outbox. You can (and should) use Streams as part of an outbox pattern, but change data alone isn’t enough. I stumbled through the transactional outbox pattern recently when this newsletter failed to send out emails but the data said everything was fine. The article goes through that example as a case study and talks about the dual write problem as a particularly tricky distributed systems issue. Worth reading if you’re using DynamoDB streams to publish domain events.

💡 Tip of the Week

I advocate strongly for stepping away from the computer screen and going outside. There’s a famous Dolly Parton quote “Don’t get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” James Mahy gave a somber reminder to developers last week with a comic that hits a little close to home. It’s ok to take it easy and enjoy life. Not everything needs to be about learning about the next frontier model or trying to upskill.

Last Words

We were all over the board this week with content, which I find to be a good thing. I’m glad it’s not the AI rainstorm we’ve been having for the past several years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan and very excited about it, but even with everything changing, it’s still critically important to understand how to design systems and reason about complex problems.

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