We talk a lot about “the community” in tech. But not all of us know what it is, how to get involved, or where to find it. — I was talking to some of my friends over the weekend about tech. We talked about keeping our skills sharp and staying up-to-date with the latest and greatest. As most of us know, the tech industry moves super fast. New, innovative features and services are introduced weekly, with opportunities to…

I created an automation to collect writer analytics and convert blog posts to audio files. Now you can too! — I was inspired by a post from Ran Isenberg last week. He created an automation to take his blog posts, run them through Amazon Polly, and create a spoken form of his content. His automation emails him a copy of the output so he can save it on his site…

I pitted Lambda, direct integrations, synchronous express step function workflows, and AppRunner against each other to see which was fastest and could scale the best. — When it comes to serverless development, we all know you have options. There are 10 different ways to solve any given problem — which is a blessing and a curse. How do you know which one to choose? Are you comfortable with the trade-offs of one over another? How do…

Hot take alert! Some of the “best practices” we’re seeing nowadays are taking the simplicity of Lambda and throwing it right out the door. — You may or may not know that I run a weekly serverless newsletter. The newsletter compiles the best serverless content every week and gives a summary with my thoughts. I love doing it — it’s a great way to stay up to date on all the new feature releases and…

Inspiring success stories make it tempting to jump straight into the deep end. But following in the footsteps of others might lead to building something you aren’t ready for. — I’m at the serverless architecture conference in London this week. It’s great to be around some of the brightest minds in serverless. I’ve met some friends I haven’t seen since re:Invent and made some new ones as well. As I was sitting in a session earlier this week I began…

Do you find yourself rebuilding serverless tools over and over for your side projects? Me too. So I made the serverless toolbox! — I recently wrote about some of the benefits of building a bunch of side projects. I talked about building automations to take over mundane, everyday tasks, but one of the main points I mentioned was nagging at me a bit. In the post, I spoke about building a “serverless toolbox”…

The first version was great, but it didn’t use the real ChatGPT. I made some updates and now it’s better than ever. — Back in February, I wrote about a fitness app I built using ChatGPT. It wasn’t an app so much as it was a daily email with a randomly generated workout. And it wasn’t ChatGPT, it was one of the other AI models available from OpenAI (ChatGPT wasn’t available yet). As…

Trying to decide if going serverless is for you? There are a few trade-offs you need to consider first. — I recently wrote about how serverless services can be used anywhere. I tried to change the messaging around these services to help people understand they aren’t exclusively for serverless applications. You can use serverless services for any part of your app that runs on-prem, in a Kubernetes cluster, or anything…

I’ve been building APIs for years, but recently discovered the power of inferring data from user sessions for a better developer experience. — I’m building a game. No, it’s not a serious game that I intend to make money on or have thousands of users playing simultaneously. It’s a game that serves two purposes: Help me learn about front-end development with Next.js (I’m always trying to learn something new)