Clawdbot bought me a car
Outsourcing the painful aspects of a car purchase to AI was refreshingly nice, and sold me on the vision of Clawdbot (now OpenClaw)
AJ Stuyvenberg
The internet home of Aaron (AJ) Stuyvenberg. Software Engineering blog, BASE Jumping videos, misc ramblings.
Latest posts
Does AWS Lambda have a silent crash in the runtime?
Understanding what's happening in the "AWS Lambda Silent Crash" blog post, what went wrong, and how to fix it
Avoiding the Lambda Doom Loop
Heads up serverless developers! A recent change in the Lambda sandbox environment changes how timeouts are handled, potentially causing your function to enter a permanent doom loop. This post will explain the change, how to spot it, and how to avoid the doom loop.
BASE Jumps & Backups - how I use Synology and AWS to store my data
Erasure coding and multi-tier backups can help you store your data safely and cheaply. Here's how I use a Synology DiskStation and AWS Glacier to store my BASE jumping videos, and my opinions on both after a bit of use.
Ultimate guide to secrets in Lambda
Securing your API Keys, database passwords, or SSH keys for Lambda Functions is tricky. This post compares Systems Manager, Secrets Manager, Key Management Service, and environment variables for handling your secrets in Lambda. We'll cover costs, features, performance, and more. Then we'll lay out a framework for considering the risk of your particular secret, so that you know what's best for your…
How Lambda starts containers 15x faster (deep dive)
We've seen how containers on Lambda initialize as fast or faster than their zip-based counterparts. This post examines exactly how the Lambda team did this, and the performance advantages of everyone shipping the same code.
The case for containers on Lambda (with benchmarks)
Lambda recently improved the cold start performance of container images by up to 15x, but this isn't the only reason you should use them. The tooling, ecosystem, and entire developer culture has moved to container images and you should too.
You shouldn’t use Lambda layers
AWS Lambda layers can help in certain, narrow use cases. But they don't help reduce overall function size, they don't improve cold starts, and they leave you vulnerable to a particularly nasty bug.
Understanding AWS Lambda Proactive Initialization
AWS Lambda warms up your functions, such that 50%-85% of Lambda Sandbox initializations don't increase latency for users. In this article we'll define Proactive Initialization, observe its frequency, and help you identify invocations where your cold starts weren't really that cold.
Thawing your Lambda Cold Starts with Lazy Loading
This post will show you how to identify opportunities where Lazy Loading dependencies can help you reduce Cold Start Latency. We'll walk through a demo application and measure the performance impact of Lazy Loading in AWS Lambda!