This week, AWS have announced Lambda Web Functions, which, after fighting with Amplify for the last few years, made me drop what I was doing and have a play.
I was thinking the other day how much I missed StumbleUpon.
I’ll be speaking in person at DevOps Nottingham on Tuesday, 25th August 2026 at Fothergill House. The talk is based on my article, The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning.
The other week I came across the concept of Fuben-Eki, which roughly translates as the “benefit of inconvenience”. Initially I thought it sounds like one of those ancient Japanese philosophies that has been tidied up for LinkedIn and eagerly scrolled down to the comments to see the ‘Engagement’ but it is apparently a relatively recent system-design concept. Hiroshi Kawakami described it as looking for benefits that can only be gained through inconvenience: value that sits outside the usual axes of efficiency and functionality.
AWS appears to have spent June quietly scattering new FinOps-shaped features around the place. Some are immediately useful, some are probably worth a exploratory look, and some are AI-flavoured that I want to poke them with a stick before declaring them helpful.
