Allen Helton
@AllenHeltonDev
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Dad | AWS Serverless Hero | Ready, Set, Cloud Creator | JS Dev | Ecosystem Engineer @momentohq
McKinney, TX
Joined February 2012
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It's with a heavy heart that I share an update that has turned my life upside down. My world is spinning.
This story is hard for me to share, but I could really use the support right now 💙🧡
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I'm loving the way my stickers turned out. Who wants one?
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If you currently or at any point in the future will build APIs for public consumption, please read this entire series by
@paul_asjes
, it's awesome.
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People often tell me "
#serverless
is too expensive at scale", but rarely can they tell me what "at scale" actually means.
So I did some math and wrote an over-simplification of comparing cloud costs to find when serverless really is more expensive.
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I am honored, excited, humbled, thrilled, and about 21 other emotions right now. Thank you
@awscloud
for naming me a
#serverless
hero!
I can't wait to connect with more of you and gather thoughts and inspiration for the next generation of serverless 🔥🥰
#AWS
Heroes are passionate builders who share knowledge & inspire others. 🦸♀️☁️💡
Congratulations to our newest AWS Heroes driving impact in the
#CloudCommunity
. Thank you
@Al_Grigor
,
@lizthegrey
,
@fantasticHsieh
, &
@AllenHeltonDev
. 👉
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Hear me out - using express state machines with only direct sdk integrations should replace
#lambda
functions every chance you get. No cold starts, higher concurrency limit, faster horizontal scaling, and priced relatively similar
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Many of you know I write a lot of blog posts. What you might not know is how much time I spend every week cross-posting on different platforms to extend my reach.
I got tired of it, so I built a
#serverless
app to do it for me.
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17
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Today is my last day at
@tylertech
after 11 years. It's been incredible, but it's time to continue my growth somewhere new.
I'm thrilled to announce I'll be joining
@momentohq
next week!
I talk about my journey so far and decision to leave in this post.
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2023 is going to be a big year. Follow me for content on
° Serverless
° APIs
° Infrastructure from Code
° Blogging as a dev
And some other tidbits in there as well 🤠
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Who's ready for a hot take 🔥?
We're making Lambda too hard.
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Now that
@getpostman
has a VS Code extension, my feedback cycles have gotten even faster.
sam build
sam deploy
*send request*
No window switching, no tab bouncing. Immediate feedback from my APIs in the cloud. The way development should be ❤️
#dx
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I gave a task to a group of 4 college kids who had never used
#aws
before to make a
#serverless
web app over a semester. I pointed them at
@AWSAmplify
and within 2 months they had it fully functional with a chatbot and textract.
They had never made a webpage before either 🤯
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I can already tell it's going to be a great week, look what just came in the mail! Thank you so much
@alexbdebrie
!
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I am super excited to announce the Ready, Set, Cloud Podcast!
It covers the same type of content as my blog and will be interview driven with leaders in the
#serverless
and cloud community.
Episode 1 - What is Serverless with
@ksshams
#readysetcloud
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SNS used to terrify me. It felt like a black box where messages just disappear.
Now it's a part of almost every design I come up with.
Don't confuse unfamiliarity with complexity.
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Ever wondered which was faster: Lambda, Step Functions, direct integrations, or App Runner?
Me too, so I did a test with various amounts of load and concurrency and stumbled across some pretty cool results.
#readysetcloud
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17
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2022 has been a whirlwind, I am amazed at everything that happened.
✍ 52 blog posts
💌 38 newsletters
📢 4 conference talks
🎙 3 podcast episodes
🙌 named AWS
#serverless
hero
😍 countless new friends
Over 272K views of my content across all platforms 😵
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I've written hundreds of Lambda functions over the past few years, but I still have to copy/paste an example from a SAM template whenever I start a new project 😬
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My whole feed was
#kubernetes
this morning, and I was wondering where all my
#serverless
people were.
Then I realized they were probably still asleep since managed services have incredible uptime and they don't have to worry about pods going down.
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I spent all last week building technical diagrams for one of my apps. Today, I had someone from AWS tell me "these are the best diagrams I've seen in years"
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Last week I asked about idempotency and got an impressively disparate set of world views.
Good news! I've compiled your answers, added some color, and put them in a blog post. The results surprised me a bit and I learned a ton.
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I've joined the
#ChatGPT
bandwagon. I built a
#serverless
app that uses it to build workouts and email me the details every day. I can't even begin to describe how much time and effort this is saving me.
Oh wait, yes I can. Here's the blog post:
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WOW! Humbled once again. Woke up this morning to see I crossed 50,000 followers on
@Medium
! Thank you so much for your support and I look forward to continuing bringing high quality content week over week! ♥️
#readysetcloud
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2022 has been an incredible year for
#serverless
. We've built new apps, released new features, and grown together as a community.
In my final blog post for the year (53!) I recap the year and some of the amazing things we've done together.
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Voldemort and his son are happy I made it back from re:Invent on one piece
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I'm happy to be recognized as one of the top authors on
@ThePracticalDev
in 2021! Thank you for all your support ☺️
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My wife was describing how memory recall works in her ADHD brain. Let me summarize - very few hits on GetItem calls. Most recall is done with a Scan/Query and filtering. 😂
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The
@momentohq
party last night was the most incredible experience I've ever had at re:Invent. The ENTIRE community was there dancing, laughing, and of course, talking serverless. I even saw
@jeremy_daly
bust out the splits in a dance circle 🕺
#believeinserverless
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My time in London has come to an end. While I was here, I
🗣️ Gave 4 talks (3 unique!)
🎙️Published a podcast episode
✏️ Wrote a blog
🗞️ Sent a newsletter
👀 Participated in a o11y focus group
🎥 Recorded a video podcast
🤝 Met great people
It was amazing but it's time to rest.
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Loved the welcome committee when I landed in Seattle yesterday 🤩
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I've only been on the ground for 7 minutes but we've already found each other 💙
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I've noticed lately that serverless services seem to have an unapproachable feel if your app is containerized or "always on". We need to quell that!
These services can be used anywhere - in K8s, on-prem, and in Lambda. Here's how 👇
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Infrastructure from Code is going to play a big role in the future of
#serverless
. I tried some of the current vendors out there and formed an early opinion.
It's cool, daunting, exciting, and scary all at the same time.
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For JavaScript
#serverless
devs: I typically use Promise.all when iterating through event records in a lambda function. But I realized it aborts at the first failure, potentially leaving records unprocessed.
Now I'm starting to use Promise.allSettled, which iterates all records.
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I am regularly impressed at the speed of some AWS services. I built an express step function workflow that calls rekognition to detect labels and faces, save parsed results to DynamoDB, and publish eventbridge events...and takes ~900ms to run 🤯
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Last week I asked for some real world use cases where
#serverless
cold starts caused legitimate production issues. The response I got was an overwhelming "it doesn't cause issues".
So I took some notes and put my thoughts down in a blog post.
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Serverless Picks of the Week
#39
is here! Our 🦸 is
@FarrahC32
, head of modern compute community at AWS and OG
#serverless
hero. She is an amazing human and dedicates countless time and effort to make the community shine. Thank you for everything Farrah!
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I set a New Year's resolution to write 50 blog posts this year. Yesterday I reached that goal. Thank you to all of you that have followed me along the way ❤️
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Amidst all the GenAI releases at re:Invent this week, I found out
@getpostman
is quietly building a blazing fast auto-documenter for requests. What are the two things developers hate most? Writing tests and writing documentation. This is awesome 🔥
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#Serverless
is a never ending process of constant improvement. One of my favorite ways to do so is to remove redundant infrastructure.
Did you know that API Gateway can directly connect to over 100 different services?
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I made a
@github
action today that detects 14 different types of breaking changes. Works for both public and private repos.
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Last week I wrote an article comparing costs between Lambda and EC2 and I mentioned TCO a couple of times.
I decided to dive in to TCO a bit to help explain why even though a
#serverless
bill might be higher, it still costs your company less money.
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First time in an AWS building and I've already made myself at home 😅
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Can you remind me again why you guys like GraphQL more than REST? And don't say over-fetching.
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Can someone give me an example where
#lambda
function cold starts gave you legitimate issues in production?
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As many of you know, I was recently honored by being named an AWS
#serverless
Hero. I've had a few days to digest what was happening and decided to share my thoughts and story in (you guessed it) a blog post.
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8 years ago I was in college
6 years ago I was a junior
#dev
working through bugs
3 years ago I was a senior engineer on a big .NET app
Today I am the manager of my company's first
#cloudnative
build in
#javascript
and get to work with
@dynamodb
and
@awscloud
❤️🤩
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Look who I found walking down the streets of San Francisco this morning 🤩🤩
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A major responsibility of a Solutions Architect is drawing diagrams. For those of you just getting started, I wrote a post about things to remember when building your first diagrams.
"All great diagrams tell a story"
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I said out loud the other day I thought
@AWSAmplify
was the most powerful aws service.
When all you have to do to add cognito to your app is 'amplify add auth', you know you're on to something.
Awesome work,
@dabit3
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I'm beginning to realize the serious power in public
@getpostman
flows. I was scrolling through the list of the ones that are available and realizing these are basically free little apps 🤯
Like, someone else has done the hard work and I just have to hit "run". 💙
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Who would attend my talk at reinvent if it was called "The similarities of serverless architectures and chicken farming"?
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If you're undecided on a goal for 2023, try blogging! There are many benefits to writing and doing it in public helps the comprehension of your subject matter immensely.
I'm always available to help whether you're just getting started or a seasoned writer
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I use AI every day to boost productivity, but man I just used
@getpostman
's PostBot to generate tests for a request and I literally had to do nothing. Day seized. 🔥🔥
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9
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Grammarly just told me to remove an oxford comma. We're gonna have problems.
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Started using Nodejs 20 in my lambda functions and was able to post a message to a slack webhook using fetch. No dependencies necessary 💯
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1
40
Alright, the
@LEGO_Group
office is officially the coolest office building I've ever seen. Great to meet up with
@sheenbrisals
,
@TheLeePriest
,
@andreea_merariu
, and
@jpatel3
this morning!
#serverless
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What is
#serverless
? What isn't it? These days it's getting impossible to tell and nobody can agree. Well guess what?
I don't know what it is anymore.
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Another year in the books! I am incredibly grateful to be a member of the tech community, and I can't express how much I've enjoyed getting to know so many of you 💙 Thank you for everything!
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Ready, Set, Cloud podcast
#9
with
@alexbdebrie
coming at you🔥
Alex and I talk about the creative process behind the most famous book in modern computing: The DynamoDB Book.
We also talk about imposter syndrome and discuss some ideas for his next book🤯
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As I wrap up my last work day of the year I look back at what an incredible adventure 2023 has been:
🧑💼1 new job
📝56 blog posts
📨51 newsletters
🎙️31 podcast episodes (25 mine)
💻12 conference talks
👬Countless new friends
Thank you all for the amazing year! 💙
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Coolness of the day - I was able to trigger a
#lambda
function when my
@AWSAmplify
build finished successfully.
Shoutout to
@focusotter
for discovering this little tidbit. Here's the event configuration in SAM:
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After a lot of trial and error, I finally figured out how to load the contents of a json object in s3 via the v3 version of the aws sdk. It wasn't trivial, so figured I'd share.
#serverless
#awscommunity
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Me when people start talking about multi-step business processes
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38
I just took a driverless car with
@jamesqquick
and
@selfteachme
to go see the house from Full House. I'm having a very San Francisco day 🔥💙
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36
I had a great time on my trip. It was the first time I ever took 2 weeks off.
Lots of relaxing and self-reflection. The biggest thing I realized was that I'm burned out on all the blog writing.
Starting this week I'm taking the summer off. No blogs, just podcast and newsletter
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I published a blog post today. It's NOT a re:Invent recap, but it is about some realizations I had coming out of it.
tl;dr - you guys are awesome 💙
#techcommunity
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I've been making a little something for re:Invent I think you might be interested in 😎
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If you choose to deep dive into any AWS service next year, make it EventBridge. (Step Functions is my close second pick)
One of my favorite services is 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐨𝐧 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐠𝐞 ⚡
It gives you the ability to build serverless event-driven architectures.
It integrates natively with services like
• Lamdba
• SQS
• API Destinations
Check out the infographic for more details 👇🏽
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Serverless Picks of the Week
#44
! Our serverless🦸is
@TastefulElk
, founder of
@elva_group
and AWS Community Builder. Sebastian not only writes great content on his blog, he also builds amazing tools for
#serverless
devs. Thank you for everything Sebastian!
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Does this make anyone excited for episode 3 of the podcast?
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Just asked ChatGPT to create a mermaid diagram for a request signing workflow. Got this. 🤦
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Really excited about the demo I put together today.
It's a serverless chat app with multi-room support using AWS websockets, Momento, and no persistent data store! Gonna go over it tomorrow at 8am CST on the SaaS Factory live stream.
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6
35
Serverless Picks of the Week
#59
is here! Our serverless 🦸♂️is
@loige
, senior architect at
@fourtheorem
and AWS serverless hero. Luciano is a book author, speaker, blog writer, and co-creator of Middy. Thank you for everything, Luciano!
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If you're looking to kickstart 2023 with insights from some brilliant engineers, I highly recommend these underrated folks:
@LeeJamesGilmore
,
@kperreault95
,
@andmoredev
,
@IsenbergRan
,
@lajacobsson
,
@zachjonesnoel
, and
@anna__geller
Who else adds tremendous value to your feed?
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Welcome to all the new AWS Community Builders! You guys are an inspiration and I can't wait to see what you build 🤩
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Proud moment alert! I just surpassed 20,000 followers on
@Medium
!
The amount of support I have received these past few years is humbling, motivating, and inspiring.
Thank you everyone and here's to you!
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Since I know you all are wondering... Voldemort is safe. Happy Thanksgiving!!
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🚨🚨New Post Wednesday🚨🚨
I often get questions on "which service is better for my wallet, Step Functions or
#lambda
".
I have written a post breaking down cost and performance of both
#stepfunctions
and lambda with a real world use case.
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In all seriousness though, going to
@momentohq
is the best thing I could have done at this point in my career. It was a hard decision to leave a comfortable job, but I can already tell it was the right one.
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Serverless Picks of the Week
#40
is here! Our 🦸is
@ksshams
, co-founder and CEO of
@momentohq
. Khawaja has a history with
#serverless
, having run teams like DynamoDB. He is building a true
#serverless
cache, filling a space that desparately needed help.
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Opened a video for editing and landed on this frame greeting me. This is why I blog 🫠
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Serverless Picks of the Week
#37
is here! Our
#serverless
🦸♀️ is
@praneetaprakash
, product manager of the SAM CLI ❤️. Praneeta is responsible for many of the amazing SAM features we use today. Thank you Praneeta for making it so easy to build serverless!
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