Application Development

I published my first blog post 7 years ago. I wrote on Medium for about a year before I built Ready, Set, Cloud. For most of its life, the site hasn’t had much of a facelift or performance updates. It’s primarily served as a home for my writing, newsletter, and podcast.

Serverless When serving images from S3 stopped being good enough

By Allen Helton 07 January 2026

Serving images from S3 worked for years, until it didn't. Here's how I moved image optimization out of my workflow and made performance the default.

Serverless Road to re:Invent Hackathon: How Not to Build a Serverless App

By Allen Helton 23 December 2025

I built a deliberately overengineered serverless hackathon project with agents, event-driven choreography, and what not to do... on purpose.

Serverless A Beginner’s Guide to the Serverless Application Model (SAM)

By Allen Helton 16 August 2023

Want to get started with SAM but don't know what to do first? You're in the right place.

Ai Prompt Engineering: The Future of AI-Driven Development

By Allen Helton 14 June 2023

AI won't replace software developers. However, the required skills are going to change drastically.

Serverless Building a Serverless Post Scheduler For Static Websites

By Allen Helton 08 March 2023

Static sites are great but if you want to schedule something in the future, they leave something to be desired.

Serverless Serverless Lessons - Location Is Everything!

By Allen Helton 01 March 2023

The location of your serverless app matters more than you might think. You could add significant latency and cost if you don't take it into consideration.