James Eastham
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jameseastham.co.uk
James Eastham
@jameseastham.co.uk
Developer | International Speaker | Microsoft MVP | AWS Community Builder | Endurance Athelete

Talking Serveless at Datadog | ex-AWS

All views are my own.

He/Him
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Excited to announce my new course on Dometrain - Solution Architecture Deep Dive.

The #1 feedback I got on the first course was the depth. Don't worry, this ones goes deeper. Deeper into what it actually means to be an architect in 2025.

#dotnet

dometrain.com/course/deep-...
Deep Dive: Solution Architecture
Master solution architecture and turn business needs into scalable, maintainable systems
dometrain.com
Reposted by James Eastham
James Eastham and my latest video on software dev is up! We try to distill down when it makes sense and when not to microservice, hopefully without alienating too many folks. Have a listen and let us know what you think!
It's a great debate in modern software, do you need microservices? Or will a monolith be enough for what you need.

In the latest video in our modern software engineering series @scottgerring.com and me discuss exactly this.

youtu.be/zUhrBYH0zyw

#softwareengineering #software #development
Monorepos Vs. Microservices: The Debate You Need to Watch!
YouTube video by Datadog Community
youtu.be
January 19, 2026 at 2:34 PM
It's a great debate in modern software, do you need microservices? Or will a monolith be enough for what you need.

In the latest video in our modern software engineering series @scottgerring.com and me discuss exactly this.

youtu.be/zUhrBYH0zyw

#softwareengineering #software #development
Monorepos Vs. Microservices: The Debate You Need to Watch!
YouTube video by Datadog Community
youtu.be
January 19, 2026 at 10:15 AM
Is this album as close to the perfect rap album as it comes?
January 17, 2026 at 10:26 AM
This is an excellent website. Thanks for sharing @scottgerring.com

european-alternatives.eu/categories
Service categories | European Alternatives
List of all categories on European Alternatives
european-alternatives.eu
January 12, 2026 at 8:32 PM
Well I know what I'm trying out next week. I've got a new .NET and Lambda series in the works as well so this is perfect timing #serverless #dotnet

aws.amazon.com/blogs/comput...
.NET 10 runtime now available in AWS Lambda | Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda now supports .NET 10 as both a managed runtime and base container image. .NET is a popular language for building serverless applications. Developers can now use the ne...
aws.amazon.com
January 9, 2026 at 8:04 PM
If now is the time of AI, I want a personal AI running on my personal cloud. There is zero reason for us to all become subservient clients to American corporations. The model can change.

100% this.

Great post.
Time for my big year end blogpost about the Atmosphere.

From the personal computing perspective, the cloud has been a disaster — but we shouldn't run away from it.

We can solve a lot of problems by connecting our clouds, turning it into atmospheric computing.
Atmospheric Computing
Cloud computing has been extremely successful, but it lost the values that drove personal computing. We can solve this by evolving forward.
www.pfrazee.com
December 31, 2025 at 11:36 PM
2026 was the best ❤️
December 31, 2025 at 11:29 PM
I've watched The Grinch (Jim Carrey) and Elf in the last two nights. Two of my favourite Christmas films.

Somehow, the CGI is 'better' than it was however many years ago.

Not an anti AI post, but are we getting too digital?
December 24, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
chris evans shouts "no! i won't go back, you can't make me. i said i was out!"
from all around him, a disembodied voice booms ɪᴛ ɪꜱ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴅᴇᴄɪꜱɪᴏɴ ɴᴏ ʟᴏɴɢᴇʀ
evans screams and clutches at his arm where his mickey mouse tattoo suddenly burns. ʏᴏᴜ ᴀᴄᴄᴇᴘᴛᴇᴅ ᴍʏ ʙʀᴀɴᴅ ɪɴ ᴇxᴄʜᴀɴɢᴇ ꜰᴏʀ ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ ɪᴍᴍᴏʀᴛᴀʟɪᴛʏ
December 23, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
Study of over twenty five million people over almost four years finds that COVID vaccines reduced COVID deaths by 74% and increased all-cause deaths by zero. I don’t know how much clearer it can get than that.

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality Among Adults in France
This cohort study uses the data from all adults aged 18 to 59 years living in France on November 1, 2021, to evaluate whether there is an association of receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine with long-t...
jamanetwork.com
December 23, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
"Coding is no longer the bottleneck".

So what you're saying is that NOTHING HAS CHANGED.
December 23, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Reposted by James Eastham
@jameseastham.co.uk and I are back again talking about software engineering! This time, we dive into API-first design - what it's good for, and how you can get started with it.

Let us know what you think!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE-R...
The Incredible Power of API First Design
YouTube video by Datadog Community
www.youtube.com
December 19, 2025 at 10:15 AM
And nobody was shocked...

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
December 17, 2025 at 9:03 PM
My yearly retrospective and planning time is I think one of the most impactful things I've started doing over the last few years.

What went well, what didn't, and thinking about thematic ideas for the year 🔥
December 15, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Building event-driven systems?

Let's chat metrics! In this video, I break down the essential ones you need to care about if you're building event-driven systems.

Bonus tip, I'll also show you the simplest way to generate them from your exisiting telemetry.

youtu.be/CvgvXzLLZ2Y
The Metrics You Need To Care About Building Event-Driven Systems
In this video, we explore the vital metrics you need to monitor when building distributed, event-driven systems. Distributed tracing and structured logging provide valuable insights, but understanding macro-level performance requires generating specific metrics. We'll discuss the importance of metrics like operation duration, message size, queue depth, and errors. Utilizing Open Telemetry's semantic conventions, you'll learn how to aggregate trace data to derive these metrics, enabling you to evaluate system performance comprehensively. Watch until the end to master the metrics crucial for your asynchronous services and improve your system's reliability and efficiency. 00:00 Introduction to Distributed Tracing 00:30 Importance of Metrics in Asynchronous Systems 00:50 Key Metrics for Event-Driven Systems 02:58 Generating Metrics from Trace Data 06:54 Infrastructure Metrics and Observability 08:37 Building Comprehensive Dashboards 09:42 Conclusion and Next Steps
youtu.be
December 15, 2025 at 4:01 PM
I'm giving some IT training to the staff at my local foodbank tomorrow and want to demonstrate to them the pitfalls of AI.

Does anyone have any good examples of prompts or things to ask that almost force a hallucination, or that demonstrate the downsides?
December 15, 2025 at 9:36 AM
Something I've been thinking about over the last 24 hours, is a potential outcome of AI generated coding a split in the 'types' of software built.

One being the hyperscale, big, gnarly systems that are complex and take teams of people to operate and understand. Much like software today.

Two...
December 13, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
Gross
December 12, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves

Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars

Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.
December 12, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Disney selling out to OpenAI makes me very very sad
December 12, 2025 at 2:27 AM
Reposted by James Eastham
My grandkids will get to experience the 2nd coming of on-paper, hand drawn animation

For the next 20 years we’ll be dealing with companies maximizing existing IP in the lowest budget ways possible

deadline.com/2025/12/disn...
Disney Inks Blockbuster $1B Deal With OpenAI, Handing Characters Over To Sora
Disney will make characters from 'Frozen' and 'Star Wars' available to Sora under $1B deal with OpenAI.
deadline.com
December 12, 2025 at 2:12 AM
New course alert 🎉

It's taken me over 2 years of creating courses to finally go back to my roots.

Want to learn how to build .NET apps on #AWS? This is the course for you. In it, you'll learn about the core services you need to care about to build on AWS.

#dotnet

dometrain.com/course/getti...
December 11, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by James Eastham
This is a great post about AI by @mastroianni.bsky.social

I especially love the idea that humans are "usefully stupid" which I identify as

www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-wor...
Bag of words, have mercy on us
OR: Claude will you go to prom with me?
www.experimental-history.com
December 10, 2025 at 8:09 AM
That’s also why I see no point in using AI to, say, write an essay, just like I see no point in bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, it can lift the weights, but I’m not trying to suspend a barbell above the floor for the hell of it......

www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-wor...
Bag of words, have mercy on us
OR: Claude will you go to prom with me?
www.experimental-history.com
December 10, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Imagine changing your car’s engine while driving it down the motorway. Tricky, right?

That's what it can feel like evolving event systems.

In this video I'll show you the easiest way to evolve your event-driven systems.

youtu.be/jZyMtk8OWQ0
The Simplest Way To Evolve An Event-Driven System
Struggling with changes in your event-driven or asynchronous system? In this video, we'll explore best practices for managing event versioning and changes without disrupting downstream systems. Learn how to design your events using the CloudEvents specification and implement dual-version event publishing. We'll show you real-world examples using TypeScript and Amazon EventBridge, and how to handle multiple event versions on the consumer side. Plus, discover how to use telemetry and observability to manage deprecated events effectively. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more tech insights! 00:00 Introduction to Change in Event-Driven Systems 00:41 Designing Events with Cloud Event Specification 02:27 Implementing Versioning in Event Publishing 06:04 Handling Multiple Event Versions as a Consumer 08:29 Best Practices and Conclusion
youtu.be
December 8, 2025 at 4:01 PM