iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 05/10/2026

I'm calling it - Pre:Invent Season 2026 is open for business! Last week saw 73 new releases, compared to 33-50 in the weeks before. To help you keep track I've created the curated Pre:Invent '26 feed. Find it at buff.ly/4EMQ3Xj and subscribe to RSS and email notifications!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 11/09/2026

I'm getting so tired of Claude's shit

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 07/09/2026

I completely revamped the AWS News sponsors page! It's now got live stats, detailed sponsor package information and a form to sign up as a sponsor. I'm super happy how this turned out 🥰 See it at buff.ly/6dIBEo5

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 27/08/2026

Reach 10s of thousands of AWS specialists! Pre:Invent season is coming up - one of the busiest times for AWS releases. The AWS News Feed still has a gold sponsor slot available for September and October. It includes an ad placement with logo and CTA. Interested? Send me a DM!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 26/08/2026

I had my goodbye party at PostNL today and they gave me the whole damn Milky Way as a parting gift ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 06/08/2026

I finished reading Sebastian Mallaby’s The Infinity Machine today. Awesome read. A must-read to understand why the world of AI is as it is. It covers Hassabis’ background from chess prodigy to CEO of Google Deepmind, but also all the inventions that went into the LLMs we all use now. 5/5 stars.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 05/08/2026

Well this was a fun* way to spend half a vacation day - AWS suddenly blocked and 12 hours later unblocked the use of Haiku in my AWS News account. I scrambled to deploy a fallback to the native Anthropic API, and JUST as I deployed the fix, they recovered. Oh well, at least I have a fallback now.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 30/07/2026

I hate that this announcement doesn’t mention any prices or even if it’s an INCREASE OR DECREASE in price. (It’s an 80% decrease for Luna and a 20% decrease for Terra).

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 02/07/2026

I'm thrilled to welcome Retool as a Gold sponsor on the AWS News Feed! Go check out their AI Governance report, which found 93% of security leaders worry about vibe-coded tools in production, and only 8% call their governance strong. Link: buff.ly/IySnqYt

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 01/07/2026

I replaced my GitHub runners with Lambda MicroVMs, and maybe you should too - new blog post on the Lambda MicroVMs released last week. They're really great! In the article and corresponding GitHub repo I outline the good, the bad, and the how-to use of MicroVMs as GitHub runners. Links below 👇

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 16/06/2026

"Grok 4.3 from xAI now available in Amazon Bedrock" aws-news.com/article/2026...

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 09/06/2026

Have you seen the new popup to go ad-free on The AWS News Feed? Probably not, because I only show it once you've been active on the site for a while (2.2% of all cases). I haven't got many members yet, but 15% of people who saw the popup (17/109) clicked maybe later, which is a very good stat!

A table showing events and conversion rates. It shows 109 people saw the ad-free modal (2.2% of users) and 17 of those clicked "remind me later".

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 08/06/2026

Did you see the new Ad-Free option in the AWS News Weekly Digest? It's a great way to support the feed and get a better experience in one go! Your membership keeps the feed alive and funds its development. Go check it out in the email or on the site!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 02/06/2026

I was wrong. GPT-5.5 on Bedrock (left) is even more expensive than on Github (right).

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 31/05/2026

I had high hopes for Opus 4.8. It did not live up to them. (`echo hello world`, seriously?)

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 22/05/2026

I will give a PostNL-internal workshop "how to build your first AI agent" soon. The participants will learn about interacting with local data and external systems through tools and an agentic loop. To get them started quickly, I built a simple interface and display to interface with. Pretty nice!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 21/05/2026

Yesterday I released community voting on The AWS News Feed. But did you know your votes directly influence which articles make it to the daily digest email? So if you think everyone needs to know about a release, give it an upvote!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 20/05/2026

Did.. the AWS News Feed just get social? Yes it did! You can now vote articles up and down, Reddit-style. Let the world know what you think. And this is just the first step. I have many ideas to add more community insights to AWS News. Stay tuned!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 15/05/2026

Something's brewing at The AWS News Feed 👀

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 05/05/2026

Dear diary, today I found my AWS News Frontend repo was missing push restrictions on the main branch. How did I found out? Because Claude Code committed straight to main, triggering an untested production deployment. In other news, The AWS News Feed now has infinite scroll. Oh well.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 04/05/2026

Pages might have a memory leak. Maybe.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 25/04/2026

There are times The AWS News Feed daily digest surprises me… and I built the darn thing! There are just so many releases, it’s too easy to miss some. But on AWS News the crowd determines the most popular articles, they end up in my inbox every day, and I never miss an important announcement ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 24/04/2026

I've followed the hype and tried Caveman. After a few hours, I'm convinced it's a bad idea. By reducing everything to caveman talk, context, nuance and details are lost. LLMs match the output to the input style, so hooga-booga in is hooga-booga out. We all want to save tokens, but this ain't it.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 20/04/2026

This is how it starts - Claude Code now denies Opus 4.6 ever even existed. It was all just a fever dream 🤨

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 16/04/2026

Working on some diagrams for a doc on AI SDLC and I accidentally created this, which might turn out to be prescient..

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 16/04/2026

I built a sponsor dashboard for The AWS News Feed. It's still insane to me how easy this has become for side projects. This was about an hour of work!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 15/04/2026

Do you think The AWS News Feed looks like crap? Personally, I do. And I don't have the skills to do better - so now I'm talking to a design agency to create a proper UI/UX design! But real quality costs real money, and the feed is (and will remain!) free to use. So I'm looking for sponsors! [cont]

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 04/04/2026

Excuse me? Claude Ultraplan? Big Power Rangers vibes.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 03/04/2026

A few days ago I wrote a blog about semantic search, embeddings, and S3 vector buckets. Today I ran into this beautiful trace which captures the entire process. I just love a well-instrumented distributed system ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 19/03/2026

MAJOR update 🚀 The AWS News Feed now supports Content Search! You can now search for any term and the AWS News Feed will find instantly find any article discussing it. And it's super fast - powered by S3 Vector buckets. Go try it out now! Link in the comments 👇️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 05/03/2026

I am immensely happy to welcome local hero Cloudar as a 5-month silver sponsor on The AWS News feed! Go check out their AWS consulting and MSP services. Thanks for your support, Cloudar!

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 02/03/2026

I started exploring Claude Code today. The experience matches what I've read about it 😬

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 28/02/2026

I don't know why, but The AWS News Feed suddenly jumped to almost 30k visitors in Feb '26. That's way more than even during Re:Invent season 😮 At the same time we've crossed over 2500 email subscriptions. Up and to the right baby! 📈

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 24/02/2026

The AWS News Feed just keeps on growing, so I'm thinking about hiring a professional UI / UX agency to design v2.0 - and I'm looking for *sponsors* for this endeavor. It would be my biggest investment in the platform ever and every Silver, Bronze, and Individual sponsor would help. More info 👇

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 19/02/2026

The service deprecration everyone knew was coming is finally (kinda) here. App Runner will stop accepting new customers on April 1st, and customers should consider ECS Express Mode instead. However.. the announcement blog post was pulled. It's still on AWS News though. Link in the comments.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 16/02/2026

I built an AI agent which can analyze CloudWatch access logs and use the Honeycomb MCP server to find root causes. It works _extremely_ well and even correctly suggests the fix for any problems found. Next up: triggering a Cursor Agent to implement the fix! 🚀

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 13/02/2026

After a successful trial run I've decided to promote my AI Agents Demystified session into a full conference talk! I've submitted it to a first batch of events, so I hope to be able to present it in a venue near you soon ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 06/02/2026

First talk of 2026 is in the books! I presented ✨ AI Agents Demystified ✨ at the AWSUG NL Re:Cap in our own PostNL head offices. The audience response was really good so I'm considering sending it in to some conferences. Let me know if this is a good fit for your event ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 26/01/2026

I am super happy to welcome AWS itself as a Gold sponsor for the AWS News Feed! Their content and marketing team acknowledges the unique value of the AWS News Feed and we're looking forward to working together more in the months and years to come ❤️

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 02/12/2025

Non-AI topics get 10% of the keynote, but 70% of the attention on the AWS News Feed. Just sayin'

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 01/12/2025

The AWS News weekly digest just went out, and this edition is the prime example why you want to subscribe. Last week AWS published 95 news releases and 135 blog posts, and the digest shows you the top 10 at a glance. Easy as pie. Want to get all Re:Invent updates? aws-news.com?showSubscrib... 💌

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 29/11/2025

Re:Invent 2025, here we come! Looking forward to a intense week of learning, seeing friends old and new, and most of all: FUN 🎉💃

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 25/11/2025

Last week saw a torrent of AWS releases.. but which ones were most popular? At first it looked to be ✨ Flat-rate pricing for CloudFront, but in the end 📖 API Gateway Developer Portals got more views! See aws-news.com/popular for the full articles.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 23/11/2025

Unique visitor counts for The AWS News Feed tell me it's almost Thanksgiving 🦃📈

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 23/11/2025

I've updated the stats view on the AWS News Feed to show the daily granularity. This is what Pre:Invent 2025 looks like... and the reason I felt quite overwhelmed last week 😅

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 20/11/2025

All these AWS Pre:Invent releases are nice, but they broke dark mode on public CloudWatch dashboards. Literally unusable.

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 20/11/2025

OMFG look at these stickers! Come find me at Re:Invent if you want one 👀

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 20/11/2025

If you haven't subscribed to the AWS News Feed daily digest, now is the time! Yesterday AWS released 56 (!) new features, and the daily digest brings the top 10 straight to your inbox. Find the subscribe link in the comments 💌

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Luc van Donkersgoed @lucvandonkersgoed.com · 17/11/2025

Busy day for AWS announcements, with over 15 releases spanning services like Redshift, Backup, ECS, Route53, and EC2 Image Builder! Want the most important updates right in your inbox? Subscribe to the Daily Digest at aws-news.com?showSubscrib... 💌 Reposts and shares are ❤️

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