Amplify Datastore, programming languages

AWS offerings can be obscured by clouds of their own marketing so it was great to hear ex-AWSer Daniel Vassallo on Software Engineering Daily talking about various AWS bits in plain language. Picked up his book The Good Parts of AWS which so far is really informative and demystifies some of the AWS ecosystem.

One of the more recent AWS solutions is DataStore, which I ran into via reading Shawn Wang’s writeup in reference to using it with Svelte. It sounded brilliant but the presentation at re:Invent by Richard Threlkeld was repeatedly mindblowing; it packages up a comprehensive solution for caching, offline, concurrence, conflicts ... after watching it I can't think of building any future project without it.

Spent some time looking into Nim, Go, and Rust – all are fascinating but Rust seems to be the one that is ... about to explode? Is exploding? Has exploded and I’m only now catching up? Sheshbabu Chinnakonda’s guide to Rust for JavaScript people is terrific, and Sean Grove and Steve Klabnik’s talks about wasm and Rust are fascinating.

As amazing as Rust is, and as excited to learn it as I am, I have to be realistic about where the market is and where my strengths are. I’m much more likely to be working on the front end and in JavaScript so improving my debugging and learning TypeScript is a better use of my time, even if it feels like TS is verbosely ‘correcting’ features of JS which Rust has built-in.