Generative AI has changed the way we develop applications. Even if you haven’t embraced the hype yet, you can’t avoid reading mentions of it, and this post is no different. The biggest challenge for AI-generated code is to get consistent, good-quality output with the least amount of effort. After all, what’s the point of generating code if you then spend more time debugging it? This post explains how I try to achieve this goal.
Like many others I’ve become more and more interested in agentic coding over the past months, and I’m usually using several different tools at the same time. Today, AWS released a new editor called Kiro in public preview and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to use it for a bit over a month.
For a fresh perspective, it’s often helpful to look at a problem or task from a different lens. Sometimes, this will be better; sometimes, it’s just a good way to refresh and renew your interest in something you’ve been doing for a while. In this post, we’ll be looking at how similar designing for the cloud is to writing a story. What are the similarities, what are some key differences, and how does that actually help in any way?
Earlier this morning, AWS released PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground. In short, this is a fun little playground that lets you create miniature apps using both text and image generation. Through the Community Builders program, I got access a couple of days ago and have been playing around with it. As a spoiler, it’s the most fun I’ve had playing with AWS tools for a very long time. So, grab your air guitar and have a look at what this most resplendent app actually does.
In January last year there was an announcement for the X2iezn instance type going GA. When I saw that, two thoughts went through my head: ‘How do I pronounce this on a podcast?’ and ‘What does that even mean’? This post tries to explain the second part of that.
Last Thursday I gave a presentation at the Melbourne Golang meetup. In this presentation, I had a slide that contained a warning about “Presso-Driven Development”. Presso-Driven Development, or PDD, is a term I use to explain how some of my code comes into being. To make my life easier, and see how it fares in the wider world, I figured it’s time to put a proper definition out there.
I’m happy to announce that I’m now part of the AWS Community Builder program, in the Dev Tools category.
If you’ve attended a conference before, you know that the most exciting things don’t necessarily happen in the sessions themselves. Unfortunately, I’m not in Las Vegas, so I can’t enjoy the hallway track. Still, AWS is kind enough to offer an alternative by releasing some of its announcements outside the keynotes. Best of all, you can see these announcements happening throughout the day without needing to get up at 3 am! Below are some of the announcements that stood out to us.
Every year as we get closer to re:Invent, AWS starts releasing the big items that didn’t quite make the cut for the major announcements. That doesn’t mean these releases are less interesting than what will be released at re:Invent; just that they don’t necessarily fit the narrative for the conference. In fact, some of my favourite announcements in previous years happened during this time. So, with re:Invent now only a couple of days away, let’s look at some of the gifts AWS brought us during pre:Invent.
We’re now in the second half of 2022, which means that the new Melbourne Region for AWS can open up any day now, so it’s a good time to have a look at the implications for an APRA-regulated business. This post builds upon the excellent posts written by my colleagues about the new AWS Melbourne Region and moving to AWS as an APRA regulated business.
Once in a while AWS releases a feature that people have been demanding for a long time, and they did so again when they added the ability to close accounts from your Organization management account. Let’s have a quick look at why it’s so good to have this ability, how it actually works, and what this will enable us to do.
Yesterday I was a Lead Platform Engineer at DigIO, but today I am a Principal Consultant at CMD Solutions. So, if I actually had business cards they would show I’ve got a new title and work at a different company. Which is sort of true, but also very much not.
In an interesting discussion at work today, someone mentioned a tool that would allow you to only log in once for AWS accounts in an AWS Organization. Which surprised me, as that is built into the way the CLI works with AWS SSO. It turns out that many people were unaware of this. As I tend to complain about SSO, I figured I might as well point out one of the parts I really enjoy about it.
When it comes to computers in any form there is one task that it’s hard to find anyone who enjoys it, and that is patching. While updating a system in order to get new capabilities can be fun because of what it will enable you to do, patching means spending time to maintain the status quo. Which is both boring and frustrating. Luckily cloud infrastructure allows us to more easily automate this, so let’s have a look at how that works when running on AWS.
I wrote about version 2 of the Go SDK for AWS over 3 years ago. At the time it was just available in beta/preview mode and I expected it to become GA a bit quicker than it did. But now it's finally here!
