💻 Independent consultant ⭐️ AWS Data Hero 📖 Author of DynamoDBBook.com. Creator of DynamoDBGuide.com ⚡️ Ex-@goserverless, @HudlEngineering ✉️ DM's open!
Omaha, NE
Joined January 2017
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🚨 The DynamoDB Book is now available 🚨
Learn how to use one of the fastest growing databases around.
450 pages of tips, strategies, and more.
dynamodbbook.com/
Alex DeBrie retweeted
my biggest up level as an engineer this year has been spending time deep diving dynamodb. still in awe at how well it scales if designed correctly
i used to think it was just "aws mongo" 🤦♂️
Alex DeBrie retweeted
New blog post, reflecting on nearly seven years since the Firecracker launch, and how we're using Firecracker to power serverless databases (in Aurora DSQL) and infrastructure for AI agents (in Bedrock AgentCore).
Alex DeBrie retweeted
Powered by Neurons with Ewelina Kurtys
Today we have Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on the show. Ewelina has a background in Neuroscience and is currently working at @finalsparkai.
FinalSpark is using live Neurons for computations instead of traditional electric CPUs. The advantage is that live Neurons are significantly more energy efficient than traditional computing, and given all the energy concerns right now with regards to running AI workloads and data centers, this seems quite relevant, even though bioprocessors are still very much in the research phase.
Watch On YouTube: piped.video/-9i9Qi9u1fc
@seanfalconer | @alexbdebrie
Alex DeBrie retweeted
Who wants to come work on the next generation of Sentry?
We’re looking for folks who want ownership, who have the skills to handle it, and are willing to put up with how hard it is to build a great company.
If that’s you, shoot me a dm with credentials to back it.
Alex DeBrie retweeted
I think congrats again to OpenAI for cooking with GPT-5 Pro. This is the third time I've struggled on something complex/gnarly for an hour on and off with CC, then 5 Pro goes off for 10 minutes and comes back with code that works out of the box. I had CC read the 5 Pro version and it wrote up 2 paragraphs admiring it (very wholesome). If you're not giving it your hardest problems you're probably missing out.
Awesome DynamoDB: A handy list of resources for getting up to speed on modeling, operating, and using Amazon DynamoDB by @alexbdebrie
github.com/alexdebrie/awesom…
[send to interested friends pls]
We are expanding the @aidotengineer team (and will be announcing our first Fall summit soon (Nov 19-22) and then our 2026 slate and our new team lineup.
AIE now reaches over 1.1m AI Engineers a month and the conferences have ~doubled every year. We're doubling again next year. It's helped companies hire, and helped companies get new jobs. People have even met and fallen in love at AIEs (!!)
If you enjoy working with engineers and want to help make AI Engineering a force for good over slop, come join us. Things inflected in a v big way this year (not exaggeration) and we need help to make it a quality community for every stakeholder from attendees to sponsors to speakers to online!
if you are "High Agency" and want to propose your own role, info @ ai . engineer works, as does swyx @
If you read this blog post and don't want to preorder the book, I don't know that we can be friends
My book, "The Origins of Efficiency", is now officially available for preorder.
construction-physics.com/p/m…
Alex DeBrie retweeted
We had @rafalwilinski on Software Huddle to talk about AI Agents and building with AI.
Watch on Youtube: piped.video/oZbKtwS5YXM
- @zapier Agents
- How does it differ from previous workflows?
- Does text transform into a workflow?
- Using Zapier's existing tools to power Agents?
- Agents are given a only set of actions from which they can choose
- Browser related stuff?
- Choosing a model
- Different prompts for different models?
- Most often used models
- TypeScript or Python
- Cost
- Less talk about non AI stuff
- On regular devs building with AI
- Protecting against user behaviour
- Future of RAG
- Is AI progress slowing down?
- Personal AI tools
- Losing understanding of repos?
- Would you need Software Background in a few years?
- GitHub Actions
@alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer
Great to talk to Rafal! Have been in the same circles as him for ~10 years, and he's very good.
He's doing a bunch of AI Agent work now, so it was fun to hear what he's learned about reliability, improving systems, etc. from his work.
Check it out
Let's build AI Agents 🏗️
Lessons from Building AI Agents with Rafal Wilinski 🎉
Today we're talking with one of our favorite engineers, @rafalwilinski. Rafal has been on the cutting edge of AI development in the last few years as he has led AI teams at Zapier and Vendr.
Rafal walks us through the hard-won lessons about actually integrating AI tools into the applications you're building. One of the hardest things in integrating these AI tools is how to ensure you're getting better and not regressing as you improve your prompts and upgrade your models. He shows how using evals is one part of the story along with deeply investigating customer signals to see how they are or aren't succeeding with AI.
Along the way, we also talk about RAG, his favorite models, his AI development toolset, and why Poland has been killing it lately. Check it out and be sure to follow Rafal if you want to learn more on building with AI.
Watch on YoutTube: piped.video/oZbKtwS5YXM
@alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer
Alex DeBrie retweeted
Building a High-Ownership Engineering Culture with Matt Watson
If you’ve ever felt like engineering teams are stuck in execution mode—heads down, building what they’re told—then today’s episode is for you. We're talking about what it really takes to build high ownership engineering cultures where devs aren't simply just shipping code, but they're helping shape the product.
And our guest this week is Matt Watson. He's a long time founder, engineer, and now the CEO of @fullscalekc, a company that helps startups and scale ups, grow their engineering teams with top talent from the Philippines. Matt's also the author of a book called Product Driven that shows how engineers can build with more clarity, purpose, customer focus and we get into some of the details in that book during this podcast.
So in this episode, we get into everything from the downsides of specialization to the importance of empathy, to why code shipped isn't the same as value delivered. We hope you enjoy it.
Watch On Youtube: piped.video/ePwYxWCQyQY
@mattwatsonkc | @seanfalconer | @alexbdebrie
Alex DeBrie retweeted
We’re seeing AI increase CI demand by over 60% quarter over quarter.
To learn more about how things are changing for CI, checkout @aayush_shah15's conversation with @alexbdebrie.
Alex DeBrie retweeted
"We run benchmarks continually across all of our competitors, not just queries - even connections, ensuring we don't add any latency at all." @isamlambert
Performance is such a competitive advantage which easily slips away if you're not constantly paying attention to it.
Alex DeBrie retweeted
For the #ElastiCache users out there. We just launched support for @valkey_io 8.1, which includes memory efficiency and performance improvements as well as add Bloom filters as a native data structure. Check it out aws.amazon.com/blogs/databas… !
Great to talk with Aayush -- I loved Blacksmith's recent post on multi-tenancy economics, and he had a bunch of good thoughts on cloud economics generally.
Very interesting to see them choose Laravel for their control plane! Deeply technical team (lots of Cockroach DB + systems background), and a lot of services in Go, but Aayush said Laravel is perfect for control planes.
Check it out
Building CI for the Age of AI Agents with Aayush Shah 🎉
Today's episode is with Aayush Shah. Aayush is one of the co-founders of @useblacksmith, which is a CI compute platform. Basically, Blacksmith will run your GitHub Actions jobs faster and with more visibility with the standard GitHub Actions CI runners.
The founding team has a fun background doing systems work at Cockroach and Faire, and they're taking on a big problem in running this massive CI fleet.
The explosion in AI agents has really changed the CI world. CI is more useful than ever, as you want to be sure the changes from your agents aren't breaking your existing functionality. At the same time, there's a huge increase in demand and spikiness of CI workloads as developers can fire off multiple agents to work in parallel, each needing to run the CI suite before merging. Aayush talked about how they're handling this load and facilitating visibility into test failures.
We also covered cloud economics. Aayush said the traditional cloud-based storage options don't work for them -- EBS and locally attached SSDs are too expensive for their workloads where they don't need the standard durability guarantees. He walks us through building their own fleet outside the hyperscalers and the plans going forward, along with some of the economics of multi-tenancy that Blacksmith has previously written about.
Watch On Youtube: piped.video/5-2GM-PD9JE
@alexbdebrie | @seanfalconer
