I try to tweet novel things about AWS.“Shit-poster extraordinaire” according to @LastWeekInAWS. He/him. AWS Serverless Hero
Melbourne, Australia
Joined April 2011
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This is probably the most delightful thing I have ever read about myself. I love it so much.
@forrestbrazeal: thank you for *getting* me.
Everyone else: read the whole article, it’s great.
newsletter.goodtechthings.co…
AI has made my abandoned "browse any Docker image" website side-project useable. It now indexes images twice as fast, files can be deep-linked, og:images, and the ability to view only hidden files. E.g. here's a file left behind in a CodeBuild layer.
ima.ge.cx/public.ecr.aws/aid…
AI cut indexing time in half, but now the limiting factor is network bandwidth. AI asked AWS to enable scalable network bandwidth. It's now checking on that request every hour. Then it will experiment with perf in dev while I sleep and push to prod once validated. What a world.
Lambda Web Functions were released today. I got carried away and wrote three blog posts about them.
1: A collection of technical tidbits.
2: They're not actually Node.js-only, you can run Go/Rust.
3: They're cheaper than Event Functions at processing events.
1/4
Lambda Web Functions aren't strictly limited to only Node.js, despite what the docs and launch blog say. You can instead run Go (or Rust) on them and save money through better CPU and memory utilisation, and easier multi-threading.
3/4
awsteele.com/blog/2026/10/12…
Finally, Lambda Web Functions as queue consumers. Regular ("old") Lambda functions have been repositioned as Event Functions, but you can handle events with Web Functions too. The secret ingredient is EventBridge Pipes. It even works out cheaper!
4/4
awsteele.com/blog/2026/10/12…
I know I've fanboyed about Amp before, but it just keeps getting better. This weekend I bought a Mac mini and got Amp to set it up as my new Amp runner + GHA runner. The macOS app is great, and I love the desktop sharing. Subthreads are so good. And now Claude subscriptions too!
This is a really nice improvement: you can now include EC2 resource tags in VPC flow logs. I wrote a poor version of this about 8 years and 3 jobs ago. It's infinitely more useful than raw IP addresses for making sense of east-west traffic.
aws.amazon.com/blogs/network…
What’s the best way to move 2x elderly dogs and 1x elderly cat from Melbourne to London?
Assume price-insensitive and strong preference to avoid putting them in the cargo hold.
Aidan W Steele retweeted
How down is AWS in the middle east? 2027 down. I guess at least they sent an update.
I very much enjoyed reading this. Glad to read something that isn’t about AI every single day.
Just posted the next entry in the fast-date series! This time, a faster way to convert a timestamp ➜ Hour, Min, Sec.
benjoffe.com/fast-time-of-da…
CloudWatch supporting org-wide rules to automatically enable VPC flow logs is nice, but the fact that it's limited to CWL log groups as a target is a deal-breaker.
I want S3 destinations. The docs even tease the possibility!
Aidan W Steele retweeted
I remember reading about Actually Portable Executables by @jartine and having my jaw drop.
(I even tried to contribute to Cosmopolitan and got Google to sign off on it! That's another fun story)
I tender my submission to the pantheon: Actually Queryable Executables
#sqlite all the way down.
fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actu…
I was sitting in the airport and had an idea for a Lambda MicroVM use-case: building Docker images, right from your laptop(ish). So you can do something like this:
docker buildx build --builder lambda --push -t aidansteele/example-image .
github.com/aidansteele/uvm-b…
What reason is there for only passing through the AWS tags, and not the user-defined tags? This could have been so useful!
aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wha…
Hypothetical: anyone got a US immigration lawyer they recommend? I want to see if I'm eligible for a visa to work over there. I think an O-1 might be more plausible than an E-3, but I honestly have no idea.
