🦸 Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Gregor Hohpe, tech strategist, author, public speaker, and many other super smart things. Gregor is an industry icon, who regularly distills deep, technical information into easy to understand truths and concepts. If you don’t already follow him, do it now. Right now. Thank you for everything you do, Gregor!

💯 Spotlight

There are no hard and fast rules to modern app development. We jokingly say “it depends” to every architecture question because in reality… it does. But just because it depends doesn’t mean there are no rules or guidelines. James Eastham wrote a hybrid blog post / code repository last week simply called patterns of modern app development that goes through core, fundamental patterns of a cloud-native application. He talks about what serverless does and doesn’t mean, and really gets into the details of an example app he wrote that beautifully illustrates how the toolbox of services we have at our disposal can be used efficiently and well.

🔥 My Favorite Content

I’m sure by now most of you have used generative AI in a project somewhere - either for work or on the side. But did you add tests for it? How do you add tests for something thats generative? By definition, the results of a GenAI prompt will be different every time it runs. Lee Gilmore has an answer though. He shared an article about how he tests AI responses with AI. Yes, the AI-inception is real, and it actually makes a lot of sense. This is a clever solution that builds a test harness to deterministically validate responses when you’re building with an LLM. Very cool, Lee!

Whenever I watch a developer give a demo where they fly through a terminal with a bunch of different commands I usually both feel in awe and a bit intimidated. Call me new fashioned (totally a phrase) but I never really got into doing things through the terminal. At this point I feel like I might be too far into my career to shift over to it. But Brian Rinaldi might have changed my mind with his blog post last week. He did a write up on using Amazon Q with the AWS CLI. Apparently it’s never been easier to get started with the CLI because Amazon Q not only adds command hinting, but it also can convert natural language to commands. Brian’s article is full of gifs demonstrating how easy it is to use so you can see it in action.

A few weeks ago, one of my automations randomly stopped working. After looking into it, I noticed I was getting throttled by Amazon Bedrock. Hoping it was a momentary service issue, I extended the backoff/retry config and moved on. Apparently I wasn’t the only one this was happening to. Steve Sanders wrote a short blurb last week consolidating evidence this is happening to lots of us. Unfortunately the article doesn’t give a solution outside of use provider libraries instead of Bedrock, but it is good to know I’m not crazy 😅

We’ve seen a few notable companies being vocal lately about leaving the cloud in favor of on-premises. It’s an interesting decision that I know many of you will just shake your heads at. I stumbled upon an article by Rob Pankow last week that attempts to explain why companies are ditching the cloud and I think he’s spot on. Like I already said in this newsletter, “it depends” on whether or not it makes sense. The article points out some great nuance on the topic and gives a brief glimpse of what the future holds when it comes to cloud workloads.

💡 Tip of the Week

I’ve had several conversations with people in tech lately about imposter syndrome and how it cripples their creativity and confidence. This post from Julia Furst Morgado last week is right on the money. I love her optimism and truth telling. If you take away one thing from the newsletter this week - let it be this.

4 fears hold us back

1️⃣ The messy unknown
2️⃣ Being judged
3️⃣ Taking the first step
4️⃣ Letting go

Letting these fears control us keeps us stuck. Good ideas need action to come alive.

Stop planning 👉 just start. pic.twitter.com/N5OT8uqXew

— Julia Furst Morgado (@juliafmorgado) November 8, 2024

🐣 New Releases

Congratulations to the new AWS Heroes!!! There are some familiar faces in there, notably Marcin Sodkiewicz, Stephen Sennett, and Vadym Kazulkin ❤️❤️

Amazon Bedrock now supports Claude 3.5 Haiku. This is the less expensive, slightly less capable version of Sonnet, which is what we’ve been using the past couple of months.

Lambda announced JSON logging support for .NET last week. This is the same JSON logging available for Python, Node, and Java application logs, now extended to .NET.

Amazon CloudFront no longer charges for requests block by AWS WAF. This seems like the right call to me. No changes to make in your apps, you’re just going to stop being billed for them 🔥

Last Words

Next week you’ll have a guest author for the newsletter, as I’ll be at Disney World for my daughter’s Make-a-wish wish. I’m so happy she gets a truly one-in-a-lifetime experience where she gets to meet princesses, see castles, and experience real magic, but at the same time, am crushed we’re doing it through these means.

If you’re the praying type or are one to send good will or vibes, please send them our way. And if you’re looking for a special organization for some end of the year donations, consider Make-a-wish, they are amazing people doing selfless work to bring a smile to kids’ faces.

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