DEV Community: Peter Sankauskas

Your Best Engineers Might Be Your Worst Interviewers

Peter Sankauskas — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 18:23:49 +0000

Startups tend to assume that their best engineers will also make the best interviewers. After all, if someone can write elegant code and solve hard problems, surely they can spot talent in others… right?

Well, not necessarily.

I’ve seen some of the most talented engineers fumble and underperform when it comes to hiring. The fact is, interviewing requires an entirely different skill set. One that often doesn’t come naturally to introverted or black-and-white thinkers.

Stressful interviews

Great engineers are...

https://pas.ventures/posts/2025-07-best-engineers-worst-interviewers/

Most loved AWS services for 2025

Peter Sankauskas — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:24:05 +0000

The results of the Answers for AWS community survey are live and you can check it out here:

https://answersforaws.com/2025/

Perhaps no-one is surprised, but the most loved AWS service in 2025 is Simple Notification Service (SNS). Congratulations.

You can see more graphs, trends over the years and details for each category.

Enjoy!

Upgrade Slack GHA

Peter Sankauskas — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:17:15 +0000

If you like having your GitHub Actions workflows post messages to Slack, well, things just got a lot easier. Version 2 of slack-github-action has been released, and it makes your workflow file so much nicer because it supports YAML! Here is what it looks like.

BEFORE:

      - name: Post to Slack
        uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v1
        env:
          SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN }}
        with:
          channel-id: "C3P0ANDR2D2"
          payload: |
            {
              "blocks": [
                {
                  "type": "section",
                  "text": {
                    "type": "mrkdwn",
                    "text": "My message goes here"
                  }
                }
              ]
            }

AFTER:

      - name: Post to Slack
        uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v2
        with:
          method: chat.postMessage
          token: ${{ secrets.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN }}
          payload: |
            channel: "C3P0ANDR2D2"
            blocks:
              - type: section
                text:
                  type: mrkdwn
                  text: "My message goes here"

So much prettier and easier to read/maintain.

Note, you will have to shuffle some things around (like where the token is specified), and be explicit about the method you are using.

Here is an example of an update message

      - name: Update Slack with success
        if: ${{ success() }}
        uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v2
        with:
          method: chat.update
          token: ${{ secrets.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN }}
          payload: |
            channel: "C3P0ANDR2D2"
            ts: ${{ steps.slack.outputs.ts }}
            blocks:
              - type: section
                text:
                  type: mrkdwn
                  text: "My updated test"
                fields:
                  - type: mrkdwn
                    text: "My updated field"

I used Cursor to help me do all of the conversion from JSON to YAML, so this wasn't too painful of a change.

Happy Coding!

AWS Predictions for 2024

Peter Sankauskas — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 19:01:19 +0000

As you all know, the 2024 survey is live and well underway. I'm excited to share the results with you after it wraps up. In the meantime, I wanted to reflect on last year and make some predictions for 2024.

Infrastructure as Code

Under the IaC category, in July 2023, AWS added loops to CloudFormation, finally ticking a box the community has been asking for since troposphere. I suspect that, in combination with the Terraform licensing changes, it may keep people using CloudFormation for a while longer.

Speaking of which, I debated a lot on whether to separate Terraform and OpenTofu into separate questions. Ultimately, I decided to keep them together, but this may have been a mistake. What are your thoughts?

CI/CD

What surprised me the most about the 2023 CI/CD results was that Jenkins still topped usage at 76%. The retention of GitHub Actions is amazingly high, though, at 99%, so I am expecting to see Jenkins lose the top stop in favor of GitHub Actions.

All of this has nothing to do with AWS, which is telling. Their strategy has been a bit all over the place, and CodeStar is being discontinued in July, so that will be removed from the survey next year.

Serverless

In 2023, SAM and Serverless Framework were neck and neck at 50% usage. AWS SAM, however, had higher retention, so my prediction is that it will pull ahead in 2024. That is unless CDK overtakes both of them, given it had much higher retention (84%) vs AWS SAM's 69%.

AWS Application Composer was brand new when the survey ran last year and had 63% interest, so I'm excited to see how far it has come in a year.

AI/ML

In January 2023, most people hadn't heard of OpenAI. It was mentioned a few times, so I included it in the "Others" results, but boy things have changed in a year. This time, it earned a dedicated spot on the survey and I am expecting it to top the positive/negative split beating out all other AWS AI/ML services.

Also, now that expectations are a lot higher for the category, I suspect the happiness scores will be down for 2024.

Well, there you have it. I'm excited to see how these predictions hold up. If you haven't already, please consider taking the survey and sharing your experiences with the community. I'll be back with the results soon after it closes on February 16th.

First posted on Feb 5, 2024 at https://answersforaws.com/blog/2024-02-05-predictions-for-2024/