Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Tobias Schmidt, software engineer and recent 2-time book author! Tobias has a fantastic newsletter that helps you learn the fundamentals of AWS through practical skills and real-world examples. He also published his second book, The CloudWatch Book last week! Congrats on the book and thank you so much for all your work to help educate others about working in the cloud 💙

Tutorials

Have you ever tried to get production access in Amazon SES to send some emails? It’s hard! I have tried on two separate occasions to move this newsletter over from SendGrid to SES, but to no avail. Luckily, Warran Parad has some tips for us in his blog post from last week where he shares what has worked for him to get SES production access. The blog is an interesting mix of opinion and fact but blends well into a great, credible read. TIL!

I’ve seen a rise in server-side rendering (SSR) lately. Whether I’m just noticing it for the first time or it’s beginning to gain popularity again, I’m not really sure. But it’s intriguing nonetheless. Omid Eidivandi shared an article last week on enterprise-level micro-frontends on AWS that goes into tons of detail on how to implement pragmatic components rendered on the server before being served to the client. He goes through the benefits of SSR and also covers practical information like discovery, templating, and routing.

Interesting Content

Two weeks ago I did a livestream checking out Elasticsearch serverless. Last week, Elastic announced that Elasticsearch is open source again. This is great news for all of us. It really is a best-in-class service. The article is written strangely, kinda like it was written by GenAI and not cleaned up before posting. But the message of the post is clear - they are open source again!

Last week Andres Moreno and I tested to see if we could use Anthropic artifacts to build an app. Artifacts are a relatively new feature from Anthropic that allow Claude to work with full-length files and projects. I am super impressed at the quality, design decisions, and speed that we were able to get in the expirement. While I think there’s still a way to go before this becomes mainstream, it is absolutely on the right track.

Spotlight

What do developers hate? Unit testing. It’s a necessary evil that makes us all let out a sigh and roll our eyes when it’s time to write some. For me, there was a lot of ambiguity and lack of direction when I was learning how to write unit tests as a junior dev. I wish I had Lee Gilmore’s article from last week when I was starting out (heck, it’s valuable even now). In his 100th article(!), Lee teaches us how to master jest in your AWS CDK apps. He talks about folder structure, how to unit test your infrastructure - which is crazy, how to mock appropriately, and much more. Congratulations on 100 articles, Lee! Your work is outstanding!

Tip of the Week

There was a bit of discussion last week around EventBridge scheduler and how it doesn’t get enough love. I couldn’t agree more and hope we see some wider adoption. The scheduler makes it so much easier to setup both recurring and one-time events, it’s almost not even a thing to think about anymore.

EventBridge Scheduler doesn't have enough visibility and it kills me. *everybody* needs scheduling and it just does it for you https://t.co/cj95sD1mD6

— Ben Kehoe (@ben11kehoe) August 29, 2024

New Releases

AWS Step Functions released the Validation API for workflow definitions. This API will catch common syntax errors which should hopefully reduce feedback loops. I’m hoping this makes it to the AWS toolkit extension in VS Code eventually.

Last Words

Looking for more ways to consume cloud content? This post from Forrest Brazeal is full of great podcasts and newsletters all focused on the cloud. There’s so much more happening than the content I report in this newsletter, I highly recommend looking into the content from these other fantastic creators.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Allen