Monthly roundup – August 2023

Hi, here’s a quick round-up of everything I have done in August 2023.

Real-World Serverless podcast relaunched

After a hiatus, the real-world serverless podcast is back and better than ever before. It’s now available on YouTube as well as the usual podcast platforms such as Spotify. This new audio + video format gives guest speakers more ways to share their ideas and experiences. And it gives us a space for demos and whiteboarding as well.

The first two episodes of this new format are available already:

• #80 – Is AWS Bedrock the OpenAI killer? [Randall Hunt]
• #81 – Overview of AI development with LangChain [Matt Carey]

AI development will be a regular topic on this podcast given its prevalence and its natural synergies with serverless.

The next two episodes will be available soon:

• #82 – Big things are coming to AWS Lambda Powertools [Heitor Lessa] (Sep 5th)
• #83 – Unpacking Google’s latest AI announcements [Gerard Sans] (Sep 19th)

FREE courses on AWS Lambda and Step Functions

It’s been a few years since I launched the “Complete Guide to AWS Step Functions” and “Learn you some Lambda best practice for great good!“. And given the diminishing value of these early courses I’ve decided to make them available for free.

You can sign up for these courses in my school at school.theburningmonk.com.

YouTube videos

Alongside these free courses, I’m also making a push to do more with YouTube. I will release a mix of long and short-form videos focusing on AWS and serverless development. If that’s something you’re interested in, please subscribe to my channel and get notified when new videos come out.

Here are some videos that you might be interested in.

What’s hard about testing serverless?

Hexagonal architecture: the what, why and when

Bye-bye test pyramid, hello test honeycomb!

Ephemeral environments explained (serverless)

Production-Ready Serverless is back!

These free YouTube videos will complement my paid courses and workshops and give you useful tidbits about AWS & serverless. But if you want to master serverless development and get ahead of the crowd then a structured learning format is still the best way to go.

They give you a carefully designed curriculum that provides comprehensive coverage of the topic. They can go into much more depth than YouTube videos as information and knowledge are layered on gradually, with a consistent teaching style and quality.

It’s like navigating with a map vs. asking 100 strangers for directions along the way!

So if you want to take part in the most comprehensive, concise, and up-to-date training on serverless development then check out my upcoming Production-Ready Serverless workshop! It will give you end-to-end training that covers everything you need to know, including:

• How to structure your project and repos
• Writing Lambda functions
• How to test serverless applications
• Security best practices for Lambda and APIs
• CI/CD best practices
• How to manage application configurations
• Logging and monitoring best practices
• and so much more!

If you sign up right now, you will also get access to my latest course “Testing Serverless Architectures” for FREE. The course dives even further into the topic of testing and gives you an actional strategy for how to test different types of serverless architectures – REST APIs, GraphQL APIs, Step Function workflows and Event-Driven Architectures. Each chapter is accompanied by executable code so you can try these ideas out for yourself.

More blog posts

I published two new blog posts.

• What’s the most serverless way to wait for a slow HTTP response?
• Save money on Serverless: common costly mistakes and how to avoid them

If there are any topics that you’d like me to write about, please feel free to reach out and let me know on X (as @theburningmonk) or LinkedIn.

Debugger’s Guide to the Galaxy

And lastly, I recorded the pilot episode of “Debugger’s Guide to the Galaxy” on August 17th. A brand new live show I’m doing with Developer Steve from Lumigo. You can catch the recording on YouTube here.

Future episodes will be aired on Lumigo’s Twitch channel and will feature content that covers both Kubernetes and serverless (you can probably guess which ones I will cover :-P)

Looking ahead to September

As you can see, August has been a busy month! September is going to be action-packed as well. I have a bunch of content lined up for YouTube, the podcast and my blog.

I will also be speaking at the Serverless Gothenburg user group on September 14th, followed by a half-day FREE workshop in London on September 19th. Registration for the workshop is still open, but space is limited. So if you want to experience building, deploying and troubleshooting serverless applications, then claim your spot now. But please only sign up if you’re intent on coming, as this is an in-person event and we only have a limited number of spots available.

Finally, on September 28th, I’m doing a joint webinar with my friends at serverlessguru.com about serverless databases. It’s a free event and everyone is welcome to join.

Ok, that’s it from me for now, lots to look forward to in September.

Hope to see you around!