{"canonical":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/235/","categories":null,"contentText":"🦸 Community Superhero Our community superhero this week is Mariane Bekker, director of DevRel at 1Password and creator of the Founders Bay community. Mariane is an inspirational leader, empowering women in tech and encouraging diversity across our entire industry from founders to VCs. She has a weekly newsletter that shares tech events around the world. Thank you so much for everything you do, Mariane!\n💯 Spotlight Developers are fascinating. We’re the only group of people I know who almost always think “I could build this for free and make it do exactly I want” instead of actually paying for something. Which made me laugh when I saw Lee Gilmore’s post last week titled Why we built Canva for around $50. All jokes aside, this is a fantastic article of a complex build with good reasoning for the build vs buy. Lee covers everything from crucial design decisions to signed URLs at the edge, to asset lifecycle. This is a great case study of practical development to solve a problem.\n🔥 My Favorite Content How many agents would you say you have running at any given time? 1? 2? 5? What about 40? I recently was at a conference where dozens of people were bragging about running a school bus worth of AI agents all the time. I published a blog post last week talking about how you’re still the bottleneck even when you think you’ve dialed in your army of agents. It’s not that I don’t like the number of agents people are running, it’s how they’re dividing their attention and making poor choices that lead to issues in the long run.\nTaking what I said above a step further, Brian Tarbox wrote a validating post about humans remaining in the loop where he asks \"Which part was me?\" The article is a stream of thought where Brian walks through the parts of software that still need people. And while he admits is not as much as he’d like, the parts that still need us are critically important and might not be something the machines will be replacing any time soon.\nI’m not normally a fan of content that walks you through something with screenshots of the AWS console. So before I share this next one, my word of caution is to use IaC instead of doing things manually. Anyway, I thought Felex Kuria’s tutorial of how to make an email forwarder in AWS was incredibly clever. He wanted to see how low he could get his business email to cost by building essentially a proxy to his personal email. It’s a really smart solution that I like a lot, especially with AWS Workmail being deprecated next year.\nMarcos Henrique shared an update to his event-driven agents project that runs circles around his previous iteration. It’s faster, simpler, more dynamic, and takes advantage of Jev in probably the most practical use case I’ve seen so far. This is a great article that blends education with architecture and code. I like where Marcos has taken his project, and he even includes the source code so you can poke at it yourself.\n💡 Tip of the Week In a perfect example that embodies everything we talked about this issue, Danny Thompson shared last week that he’s building a fitness app specific to his needs. He didn’t like what was available because the friction was too high. So he’s using his skills and judgment to make something niche that caters to his expectations. I’m here for this!\nView on LinkedIn → Last Words Have you built something recently that you could have just bought instead? Do you actually use what you built? While developing your own thing has never been easier, I feel like I’ve been seeing attachment issues to many of the side projects making it to production recently. The thrill is in the build for many of us, not actually using it. Something to think about.\nWhat 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.\nHappy coding!\nAllen\n","date":"2026-09-28T00:00:00Z","description":"It's getting increasingly easier to build something yourself instead of buying it. But there's a few things you need to look out for before you do.","image":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/images/newsletter.png","inLanguage":"en-US","lastmod":"2026-09-28T00:00:00Z","readingMinutes":4,"section":"newsletter","tags":null,"title":"Build your own (or not)","url":"https://www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/235/","wordCount":685}