Happy New Year! 🍾
Kicking off 2023 With a Selection of Your Favourite Articles From Last Year
Dear subscriber,
Happy new year!
I’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading this newsletter, and for sharing it with your friends and colleagues.
Writing for The Serverless Mindset has been a tremendous pleasure so far! The response from the community has been overwhelmingly good. I take a lot of encouragement from every positive comment, like, or share.
As I look forward to another year of helpful insights into the world of serverless and modern cloud development, I thought I’d share some of the posts that have received the best feedback in 2022.
If you’ve read them already, perhaps they’ll make for a helpful refresher (they’re all brief anyway). If you missed them (perhaps because you’re a more recent subscriber), then I hope you’ll find them valuable!
1. The Truth About Debugging Serverless Applications
This article caused some controversy on social media, partly because not everyone in the community agrees on the exact meaning of debugging (a bit of a red herring anyway).
The article’s main argument is that debugging (regardless of how it’s done) should be a last resort. On the other hand, testing is the way to find and solve bugs sustainably.
This is not a point that I just made up. It’s a fairly old one that others have made before serverless was even a thing.
The more original point I’m making here is that traditional debugging has gotten harder with serverless (and cloud-based development). And this is a good thing.
I love the healthy exchange of views and experiences that this post has caused.
Whether you agree or disagree, I hope this will get everyone to think more intentionally about their serverless debugging practices.
2. Frameworks for Serverless Development: Which One Should I Choose?
A handpicked list of frameworks for building serverless applications, accompanied by an opinionated evaluation of each.
As this is based on my own experience (and of teams I’ve worked with), it’s inevitably biased and influenced by my personal criteria, preferences, and use cases.
Nevertheless, I think this kind of opinionated commentary can be useful. Attempting to choose the right framework when starting from scratch is not easy.
Most comparisons online simply point out a few obvious facts and then conclude with something along the lines of “they are all great so just choose what works for you”. This is technically true but not super helpful.
3. Graduating Your Serverless Monolith Into Microservices
This brief post outlines a couple of mental steps that can be followed when trying to transform a serverless monolith application into a microservice one.
The bottom line, it all begins with identifying each service’s domains and boundaries.
Podcast Episode of the Year
The best-received podcast of the year was my conversation with the great Sam Williams.
A very inspiring yet practical episode, with lots of pragmatic advice for upskilling and growing in confidence as a serverless developer.
On to 2023!
I’m excited about the possibilities that this brand-new year offers!
I’m also curious: is there anything that you’d like to write about? Or any guest you’d like me to interview on the podcast? If so, feel free to send me a message!
I’m here to help you become a better, more thoughtful serverless architect and decision-maker.
I wish you all a fantastic year ahead! 🚀