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2024 year in review

Double Delorean

I was left unsupervised for another year with a keyboard. I Entered several rabbit holes, I Cmd+Ced (copied or quit depending on context) and I Escd from an escape room. Let's see what I wrought in the last year.

Is this thing on?

I continued to iterate on Speedrun with 35 releases. I added Identity Center support, started displaying output inline in your GitHub page and reduced the hosting cost enough to make it free.

Timeline View

At the beginning of the year I held a "Done before the bass drops" competition to build a Speedrun block in 90 seconds. Y'all be slowfreaks because not a single person entered...even with one of the categories being "do something in 90 seconds"! So me and "Bobbily Ross" leapt into action and painted a happy little Speedrun.

Bobbily Ross Speedrun

Another fevered idea I had was to build an escape room that was impossible to complete unless you used Speedrun. Naturally it was loosely based on the 90's thriller "Speed". The instructions and companion site are still up if you want to get a bus up on two wheels through the AWS Console.

Speedrun Escape Room

This is now the third year of Speedrun. It continues to serve as a creative playground and as a means to discover faster ways to interact with AWS. The vibes are bottomless.

My morning routine

What would you say you do here?

Aside from Speedrun, I've been doing a spot of blogging. This year I was accepted into the AWS Community Builders program so I blogged with a bit more vigor. The main themes were speed, discoveries and the edge. A couple of highlights:

  1. Pushed the AWS JavaScript SDK team to make Lambda coldstarts faster and with my instrumentation noticed when they accidentally made it slower.
  2. Discovered a way to make secrets faster and cheaper by using DynamoDB as a Secrets Manager.
  3. Observed using environment variables add 20 ms to your coldstart.
  4. I went hard into CloudFront Functions and used them to create simple APIs, to do things S3 presigned urls can't, and publish custom metrics.

Some firsts

Podcast without a hat

I was a guest on Yan Cui's Real World Serverless podcast. For my first pod, we had a wide-ranging conversation about Amazon Cognito, the meaning of the Amazon badge colors and how to succeed at AWS, which is: stay calm, follow the data and handle it. See if you can recognize me without my hat.

Crabbing

I started learning Rust. My Lambda coldstarts have plateaued around 375ms with JavaScript, and although LLRT has a lot of promise (rimshot), it's not yet usable for libraries like jose. Since my backend codebase is 2.5K lines of JavaScript it should be an easy port. Plus, other brothers can't deny the deliciousness of crab.

Crabbing

Day 16b

I tackled the Advent of Code for the first time. It was genuinely challenging and I did a little fist pump from delight each time I solved a puzzle. I've spent an embarrassing number of hours on day 16b where I remain stuck. I'm not sure if I'll complete every challenge, but I will conquer day 16b.

Advent of Code Day 16b

Moved to BlueSky

After a year on Twitter, I've rehomed to BlueSky. I still crosspost blogs and Speedrun videos to LinkedIn. But you won't find me chiseling gargoyles on Twitter anymore, the good stuff is all on BlueSky.

What's next

A JS Conference

I've been meaning to attend a JavaScript conference and CascadiaJS might be my first. GitHub Universe didn't provide much value last year and I'm still trying to get the taste of celery and marketing out of my mouth. CascadiaJS looks to be more technical and with much less celery so I'll replace GitHub Universe with that.

A presentation

The last presentation I gave was over 3 years ago. It was called "Half of my secrets." It might be time to reveal the other half.

Resisting the bokeh

When you see good bokeh, you are like dang, I want that. Metaphorically, I've been a poor steward of using all the bokeh I have. To wit, here are some of the products, courses or books I've bought that I either haven't used or haven't made it past the second chapter.

  1. Screen Studio
  2. High Performance SQLite
  3. Mastering PostGres
  4. Total TypeScript
  5. The CloudWatch Book
  6. The DynamoDB Book
  7. AWS for the Real World

Before I add anything to my collection, I will complete one of these.

Cheers

Thanks for reading. May your 2025 be modestly faster and your code be totally sweet.