Niko Virtala

Niko Virtala

@nikovirtala.io

Building better shopping experiences for retail | Principal Engineer at SOK | Randonneur 🚲

739 followers1.1K following517 posts

AWS CloudShell documentation says: "if you don't interact with it using your keyboard or pointer for 20–30 minutes, your shell session ends" — a perfectly reasonable timeout. When accessing CloudShell via AWS Console iOS app the shell timeouts much faster, like being away from app a minute or so 😫

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It feels sad, even today. There are not too many speakers who can catch your attention and create a sense of connection the way Werner does — he is talking to me, about me 😳

My concept of humanity says people can not be replaced. It doesn't work that way, but as always I'm looking forward to what happens next. Who, what and how will they fill this void?

The invitation already said this would be special and it certainly was — it was the last re:Invent keynote we would see from him. Two more words, he said: "Werner out!"

not bad. that is 94 kilometers / active day — is that a lot or little, I guess, it depends 😁 and there are still 22 days left in the year, you never know how far one can go

due the merging strategy the repository uses, one should use conventional commit syntax on merge request title. this seems to be a) something it couldn't figure out b) something it cannot change

Metaprogramming. I think I've always been, for a long time without even realizing it, interested in programming the programming. Perhaps even more than the programming in the traditional sense. Which is why all these AI thingies feel kinda easy and natural — it is not that much different 🤷‍♂️

It is gonna be a long day today. Werner is having his #reInvent keynote this time in the afternoon 3.30 pm PST which translates to 1.30 am EET 😴 It's been my habit to watch it ever since I've been working with AWS stuff and I simply can’t let the poor schedule break the streak 😁

I learned very early this morning that Amazon #DynamoDB Streams capacity is not really unlimited and that after consuming it at 450 RPS you will be called a noisy neighbour 😅 Challenge unlocked?

nope. I just bought UAD Showtime '64 from their black friday sale, just to get disappointed a big time. the real deal, my handwired Princeton Reverb is still a light year ahead of this model

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com

It really is an incredible time to be a guitarist who *doesn’t* want to own a bunch of $2,000 amps and an expensive pedalboard of gear.

if I don't tell, or use it without customizations, nobody can say if it was me or LLM — it is pretty easy to put LLM to produce things with your style

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

dunno who should hear this but the @awscloud.bsky.social cloudwatch application signals provides pretty good level of observability to your systems straight out of the box and only using the auto instrumentation — surprisingly easy way to get started with opentelemetry! 👏

and why we've been waiting for so long? well, it has been all or nothing situation due to some choises: modern javascript (typescript) hasn't been really supported until lately

Lambda Kafka Event Source has been somewhat behind in error handling capabilities compared to AWS native event sources, but not anymore: aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh... — we got configurable retries, bisect batch on function error, partial batch responses and Kafka as failure destination 🙌

aws.amazon.comAWS Lambda announces enhanced error handling capabilities for Kafka event processing - AWSDiscover more about what's new at AWS with AWS Lambda announces enhanced error handling capabilities for Kafka event processing

Niko Virtala reposted

if you give an engineer a problem to solve but not enough time to understand the details, the solution will be over complicated. That’s just how it works, it can’t work any other way. Simplicity is hard and takes time, an unknown amount of time

psst @awscloud.bsky.social our level of expectation for standard observability just got higher

Jeremy Morrell@jeremymorrell.dev

It launched! Get traces for your app with zero code changes. No libraries, no SDK, no config. Traces show up in your dash or you can export them to your favorite o11y vendor over OTLP blog.cloudflare.com/workers-trac...