Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is Tomasz Łakomy. Tomasz is an AWS serverless hero and a very active member of the serverless community. Tomasz recently released a course on full-stack TypeScript with the CDK and is always sharing his takes on serverless and tech on social media. Thank you Tomasz, for everything you do for the community!

Tutorials and Interesting Reads

One of my favorite things about serverless apps is that I usually don’t have to deal with VPCs. But not everyone is so lucky. If you’re interested in creating a DynamoDB table only accessible within a VPC, then Yan Cui has you covered. In this article, he shows a clever solution to getting exclusive access via a VPC and what to do in break-glass measures.

I always enjoy the musings of Ben Pyle. I’ve learned so much from him over the past year. Whenever I see something new pop up on his blog I know I’m in for a life lesson. Such was the story last week when he wrote about serverless and agile. I’ve been practicing both for a long time and couldn’t agree more with Ben’s sentiments. As usual, Ben offers insights you can’t find anywhere else except through years of technical leadership experience. Great job, Ben!

Definitely not a read about serverless, but a read for content creators, was a post by Jeremy Daly last week focusing on his take on writing. It’s an extremely relatable piece for many of us, as he describes his journey through writing and all the exposure to the writing of others. If you’re looking for motivation to write your first blog post in 2024, give this a read for some inspiration.

Spotlight

George Mao teased a series called the ultimate guide to AWS Lambda development last week. He shared a bit of his motivation for his upcoming 4-part series on everything you need to know about building on Lambda. But perhaps more importantly, he shared the newly formed #BelieveInServerless community with the world. This is a community by and for our serverless friends all around the globe. A place where we can gather and get help or offer advice. A place to learn. A place to teach. I’m very excited about this and have high expectations of how it evolves over the course of the year.

Tip of the Week

I’ve had many people ask me how to get started in serverless. The answer is always the same for any tech stack, really. Lee Gilmore put it elegantly last week (as he always does). Just build.

If you want to be super confident in your own technical skills, simply do one thing:

Build. Build. Build.

You will give yourself the undeniable evidence that you have mastered those technologies and your
confidence will soar 💜

— Serverless Advocate 🥑 (@LeeJamesGilmore) January 5, 2024

New Releases

Amazon CloudWatch released an update allowing you to create account-level subscription filters for logs. This means you can create a single filter for your entire account instead of per log group. This is a huge quality-of-life update!

Eventbridge now supports AWS AppSync as a target of a rule. This means you can directly trigger a mutation in response to an event, creating seamless experiences by publishing your subscriptions from an event on EventBridge.

Last Words

The new year is starting out strong with lots of ambition in the air. I’m excited to see how the new things in the community play out and how it affects what we build in the year to come.

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