After over a decade of usage, Twitter blocked my account for no reason!
And that is why I'm opening my newsletter.
I had a sad day
A few days ago I woke up and as always the first thing I did when I sat straight in bed was to open X (Twitter). To my astonishment, they had blocked my account!
My Twitter account (mavi888uy) has been on Twitter for over a decade and if you follow me there you know that I never got into trouble. I use that account as a way to reach out to like-minded people who want to learn about serverless, AWS, and cloud computing. I don’t initiate fights or spam my content.
I love my Twitter account, I have over 16k followers, it is not a large follower number, but for me it was perfect. It is the perfect size so I could learn for the community and the community could learn from me. I post on the platform 3-4 times a week and then reply to comments or tweets some times a day. I’m by no means a heavy user of the platform, but I have been very regular since day 1.
But anyhow I woke up to my account being suspended, for no apparent reason.
When this happened I reached out to customer support right away and the only thing I got back was an automated reply that I had breached the “X rules”, but they didn’t specify which rule I broke.
After this, I continued my day as normal, with a broken heart, as I love the community I have on Twitter and I wanted to keep in contact with them.
That is why this newsletter was born
For years I have been reading that I need to open my newsletter to keep my audience reachable no matter what. But in my head I always thought “… yeah it sounds cool, but Twitter is not going anywhere”.
I got the first craving for opening a newsletter when Elon bought Twitter at the end of 2022 and the engagement in the platform dropped like crazy. But during those weeks and months, I was so busy that it was hard to act upon, and little by little the platform got back to normal again, and I forgot about this.
However, this feeling came back 10,000% stronger the morning when my beloved account was blocked for no apparent reason. All the voices of marketing gurus and social media experts I read and listened to came to my mind repeating over and over again, “Marcia, you should have opened a newsletter many years ago, now you lost access to your account, and to that network, so are fuc***”.
But as they say when was the best time to open a newsletter (you can change this for a YouTube channel, Instagram account, or whatever platform is trendy) was 5 years ago, and the second best time is NOW. That is why now it is.
Few days passed
Opening a newsletter is not something that I can do in 2 minutes, it took me a while to write the first post (this one that you are reading), set the newsletter up so it looks nice, and make sure that everything works as I like before inviting everybody to join.
During those days something magical happened, X restored my account. No email or notification was sent, it just came back. I think that the suspension of my account was a mistake that happened automatically, with nobody intending it to happen.
This can have something to do with X over the last years fired a lot of their engineering and support team, which impacts the quality of the software they are producing. In addition, they have started a strong monetization policy, trying to get people to pay for the X subscription by limiting the amount of posts people can read and post. Running a large social media platform like X is expensive, which is why is understandable that they want to monetize the users. This makes the end-user experience quite bad, more so when your account gets suspended for no reason.
This drastic reduction in the workforce has profound implications for a platform as complex and dynamic as Twitter. With fewer hands on deck, there are little resources to address technical issues, implement updates, and maintain the robustness of the system. The loss of experienced personnel who had in-depth knowledge of Twitter's architecture and systems can lead to a growing technical debt. This can manifest as more frequent outages, security vulnerabilities, and performance bottlenecks, all of which can degrade the user experience and erode user trust.
Twitter operates on a global scale, with millions of users generating a vast amount of data and interactions every second. Managing such a distributed system requires sophisticated infrastructure and a skilled team capable of handling the intricacies of distributed computing, data synchronization, and fault tolerance. The size and complexity of Twitter's architecture make it challenging to manage, even under optimal conditions. When coupled with a significantly reduced workforce, the task becomes even more complex. The decentralized nature of the platform means that issues can arise in various parts of the system simultaneously, making it harder to diagnose and resolve problems promptly.
In essence, the combination of staff reductions and the distributed, large-scale nature of Twitter's architecture creates a challenging environment that can compromise the platform's stability and reliability.
What can you expect from this newsletter?
If you sign up for this newsletter you can expect an email once or twice a month showcasing the content I created during that month (eg YouTube videos, podcasts, blog posts), a list of curated content that I find interesting, all paired with some thoughts I had during that time.
(For those who are reading this and don’t know who I am and what kind of content I create, check the last section of this post for the answer).
I don’t want to spam you and there are plenty of serverless and AWS-specific newsletters around there, I want this to be something more personal (personal in the sense that I curated, not about my personal life that nobody cares about).
In addition, as with any platform I start working with, you can expect some experimentation in the newsletter. I love running experiments with different platforms to see what content helps my audience the most. When that time comes I will let you know what is an experiment or if this is something new I’m trying out.
Welcome to my newsletter!
If you reached the end of this newsletter, then thanks!
Please subscribe if you want to get more content like this and let me know in the comments of this post what kind of things you would like to see in this newsletter. I like to write long-format pieces, so this can be a great outlet for longer discussions.
Content round-up
Here is just a round-up of the content I created during the last month:
Since the beginning of the year, I have been posting a full course about AWS Step Functions on my YouTube channel and now it is coming to an end. The videos from the last four weeks are more advanced and go into optimization, architecture, and pricing, topics that you might find interesting if you are using Step Functions. And if you are not familiar with Step Functions, don’t worry, watch this playlist from the beginning and you will become an expert.
Mastering AWS Step Functions: Cost Analysis and Optimization Techniques with Ben Smith: In this episode, I host Ben Smith, a Developer Advocate for AWS, specializing in Step Functions. Ben shares insights on cost analysis when working with Step Functions, demonstrating how to optimize cost using a mix of standard and express workflows. The discussion covers practical examples, including optimizing a shopping cart checkout system by utilizing express workflows for faster, cost-effective processing and standard workflows for longer, complex processes. The episode aims to help viewers understand how to effectively manage and minimize costs while maximizing the functionality of Step Functions in AWS.
Advanced Step Functions Patterns with Ben Smith: In this video, I continue chatting with Ben Smith, Developer Advocate at AWS. We talk about the advanced patterns Ben has developed through hands-on experience and experimentation with Step Functions. These patterns, used widely by organizations daily, include handling large lambda functions, REST CRUD API using Step Functions, Saga and Circuit Breaker patterns for error management, and leveraging Step Functions for choosing the right compute resources. The discussion covers dynamic parallelism with the map state and distributed map state for handling up to 10,000 parallel executions, showcasing real-world applications and optimizations. Ben also shares tips for efficient state management and the value of learning through building and iterating on solutions. The conversation highlights several serverless architectures, demonstrating how Step Functions facilitate complex workflows, handle errors gracefully, and optimize costs and computing resources.
Run a long execution job with no hassle and for free with Step Functions: In this video, you will see a hands-on demonstration of the Sync integration pattern within AWS Step Functions. How synchronous integration allows for the execution of long-running tasks, like SageMaker tasks or ECS container tasks, within standard workflows without incurring additional costs during the wait time. The video includes a walk-through of setting up a state machine with this integration pattern, showcasing code examples available on GitHub.
How to integrate any service or manual process with Step Functions?: In this video, you will learn the wait-for callback pattern from Step Functions. You will find a demo to illustrate how this pattern allows for asynchronous task integration beyond the predefined AWS services list, including integration with any AWS service, legacy systems, or processes involving human input, all without incurring costs during the wait time. The video includes a walk-through of setting up a state machine with this integration pattern, showcasing code examples available on GitHub.
Automating video dubbing with AWS Step Functions and Artificial Intelligence: In this video, you will see a demonstration of a custom-built application for automating the dubbing of YouTube videos, utilizing AWS Step Functions and artificial intelligence services. The solution aims to solve the challenge of producing content in multiple languages efficiently without re-recording. The complete code for the demo is available on GitHub.
Who is Marcia Villalba?
This is just a side note for those who arrive at this newsletter for the divine grace of the recommendation algorithm and might not know me. Let me introduce myself to you all.
I’m Marcia Villalba, a Developer Advocate for AWS (Amazon Web Services), and the host of a couple of YouTube channels. One in English, called FooBar Serverless, where I publish weekly content related to serverless, AWS, and the cloud. And another one in Spanish, called Marcia y la Nube, where I publish videos related to AWS and the cloud and host the video podcast - Charlas Técnicas de AWS.
I’m a software engineer from Uruguay, living in Finland for over 15 years. I have been designing and developing software professionally for 20 years and worked in all the stages of software development, building scaling and performant services.
I’m a strong supporter of managed services and the cloud, using good coding and DevOps practices and good architecture to develop software. My content is mostly catered to developers who want to become better at building distributed applications.
Here are some places where you can find me: