Lambda still has a way to go?
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 by Dave Winer

After writing the piece yesterday about AWS Lambda, I heard from a number of developers who had tried to use it and it seems it's not quite ready for prime time. 

It's really useful to get that kind of feedback, because as always it's hard to figure out what any AWS component does. Their philosophy of documentation seems to be to show you everything the package can do in all its detail before saying how it might fit in with your development work. (This is common in tech docs. I'm looking for a good simple summary of what's in ES6, but they all assume right at the top that I understand terminology that I don't understand.)

There have been some attempts with Lambda to shorten the learning curve, and this is appreciated. A simple Hello World for a Node developer that shows me how to go from a project on my desktop to a service running in the cloud would be welcome. 

I could imagine using it for some of the simple services I have running, like one that just gets the dimensions of an image, and later I could see deploying sophisticated server apps. But getting started is the hardest part of any of these projects.

It was no different for JavaScript btw. I got lucky there and hooked up with an excellent programmer who knew his way around and got tutored for a few months. That's why communities of developers are so important.

  • Have you tried this ES6 overview: http://exploringjs.com/es6/ch_first-steps.html

    • Thanks I had not seen that. Very useful. Now here's a tip for you -- you can use hyperlinks in comments. Select some text and a little toolbar pops up. Click the link icon, paste the url, click the checkmark. Here's a demo