Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Mahmoud Abdelwahab, developer advocate at Neon. Mahmoud is a fantastic public speaker and developer educator who has a firm grasp on what serverless actually is. If you’ve ever thought to yourself that a true serverless relational database is impossible, have a chat with Mahmoud, his knowledge on the topic is amazing and he explains how it works like nobody else I’ve ever met. Thank you for everything you do, Mahmoud!

Tutorials

The first article I read last week was from Zied Ben Tahar and it immediately set my week off on a good note. He wrote about using EventBridge Scheduler instead of using batch jobs when processing data. The article talks about using EDA over processing items in bulk, and I completely agree with this mentality - if your workload supports it. Some workloads don’t have events that fire when new data is added. If you can figure it out though, to Zied’s point, it’s almost always worth it. The article shows you exactly how to set it up and discusses the pros and cons of the approach.

I learned so much from the article Elias Brange wrote last week on improving CloudWatch alarms on metrics with missing data. He explained a problem I never knew I had and showed us exactly how to fix it. This is the level of understanding on something that makes me think, “this person really knows their stuff.” I love this article, it wonderfully explains the problem, gives two examples of how it crops up, shows us why it happens, then teaches us how to fix it.

Yan Cui released a new free course teaching us how to build real-time apps with Momento. It’s a little under two hours long and walks you through building a complete real-time chat app and a high-scale leaderboard service. It’s so cool for me to see the things that are popping up in the community around how easy it is to use the Momento services.

Interesting Content

In a “step back and look at where we’re at” session, Sheen Brisals talked about how serverless is for everyone. Sheen talks about the serverless landscape, who it’s really for, quells misconceptions about it being too complex, and highlights companies and individuals in the community that are doing it right. In the middle of all the serverless “backlash” lately, it’s great to see a refreshing take from a trusted voice. Thank you, Sheen!

On Friday, Andres Moreno and I did a live coding session to see if we could build a full-stack Disney princess quiz with one Lambda function. We used server-side rendering, Amazon Bedrock, and Momento Cache to see how simple we could make it. Turns out, it only takes ~100 lines of code to make something like that for both the front-end and the back end. Who knew? This was probably the most fun I’ve ever had on a live stream 😊 Here’s the spoiler if you want to save time.

Spotlight

We have a new newsletter in the community! Curated by newly minted AWS hero Lee Gilmore, this newsletter just released it’s second issue last week. I like what Lee is doing in his offering. He lists articles that caught his attention, mentions some new releases in AWS services, but also throws in some opinions from experts in the industry, offers Lee-level tips to improve engineering life, and offers a poll to gauge thoughts. There’s other things in there too, it’s a packed newsletter!

Tip of the Week

It’s not always about content. There are tons of unsung heroes enabling the community to better help each other. I love the reminder that Clark Sell gave us last week about throwing some love to the people that make it all happen. Thank you organizers and community managers for helping us get in front of audiences and providing opportunities that we’d not normally have otherwise 💙 Clark, by the way, puts on an absolutely fantastic conference twice a year. I highly recommend THAT conference to everyone.

Can we throw some love at the independent community organizers? Seriously, your dedication to a meetup, code camp, event, or whatever makes this industry special.

I know it can get damn hard; most will never understand, and some will tear you down, but it fucking makes a…

— Clark Sell (@TheClarkSell) September 12, 2024

New Releases

Cognito added email as an MFA option for user pools. Before you could only get one time passwords (OTP) via email. I like this new option!

EventBridge Pipes now support customer mananged KMS keys, allowing you to encrypt filter patterns, enrichment parameters, and target parameters with keys you own. This is a nice little compliance update.

Last Words

I’m getting the sense that the community is becoming disenchanted with generative AI. Is that the case for you? Do you use it on a daily basis? Do you use and and not want to talk about it? Or do you not use and and don’t want to talk about it? Maybe something else? Personally, I continue to use it in many of the projects I’m working on, but would love to see efforts from cloud vendors and startups shift back toward enablement, innovation, and abstractions of services and concepts in mainstream dev. Curious to hear your thoughts!

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