Hi, everyone!
The Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon is live! This is our first global hackathon and it runs through October 23, with $190K cash and AWS credits in prizes. You can build projects for Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, Bee, or any combination. My team is running this and we’ll have a bunch more to share with you, but for now, check out the link and sign up!
In other news, Ring is rolling out TAKE, its new default end-to-end encryption, which narrows what any integration on top of it can reach, and its developer portal now gives you a weekly metrics report.
On the Fire TV side, there’s a new AI-assisted guide for migrating Fire OS apps to Vega, and the TV sample apps got a refresh.
If you create content on YouTube, you can now tag the Amazon devices you mention as a YouTube Shopping Affiliate.
Our fall conference run is starting up as well, from Shanghai to Warsaw to Berlin to Athens. I’ll personally be in Berlin and Athens, so if you’re attending, come say hi!
Dev Updates
Weekly metrics reports for your Ring app — The Ring Developer Portal now generates a weekly report with 14 metrics across active users, account linking, trials, subscriptions, and revenue, each shown for the selected week, the week before, and year to date.
Just Walk Out: payment and identity API fixes — The Just Walk Out payment and identity APIs received minor fixes and improvements.
Vega EPG sample app — The TV-guide sample now runs on Vega OS 1.2, with a fix so its dependencies install cleanly from public npm.
React Native multi-TV starter — The multi-platform TV starter template is now on the latest Vega SDK.
Announcements
Build, Ship, Shape: our first global Amazon Developer Hackathon
- The first global Amazon Developer Hackathon is open through October 23: build or significantly update a working project on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee across four tracks, for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits plus a 1:1 with the Amazon Developer team.
Ring introduces TAKE, its new default encryption standard
- Ring’s TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption) will roll out as the default end-to-end encryption for every Ring customer worldwide, and because Ring itself can’t decrypt that footage, it narrows what your integrations can access and what Ring can hand to law enforcement.
AWS and NVIDIA expand their partnership with 2 million more GPUs
- AWS and NVIDIA will deploy two million additional GPUs and deepen their work across CPUs, networking, and robotics, growing the capacity you can train and run models on through AWS and Bedrock.
YouTube Shopping affiliates can now tag Amazon products
- US creators in the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program can now tag Amazon products across Shorts, long-form videos, and livestreams and earn commissions, a new surface for anyone building on Amazon’s affiliate program.
Events
Our fall run kicks off in September and stretches through October. We’re giving talks and workshops at AGNTCon + MCPCon China, Agent Conf in Warsaw, and CityJS Athens, and we’ll also be on the ground at IBC, NAB, and GitHub Universe. Come say hi!
| Date | Event | Location | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 31–Oct 23 | Build, Ship, Shape: Amazon Developer Hackathon | Online | Our first global developer hackathon: build on Fire TV, Alexa+, Ring, or Bee for a share of a $190K pool of cash and AWS credits, with submissions closing October 23. |
| Sep 6–7 | AGNTCon + MCPCon China | Shanghai, CN | Sr. Dev Advocate Giovanni Laquidara is giving a talk on Sep 7. |
| Sep 11–14 | IBC Show | Amsterdam, NL | The media, entertainment, and broadcast-tech show where streaming-device teams gather. |
| Sep 11 | ZurichJS Conf | Zurich, CH | A JavaScript community conference in Switzerland. |
| Sep 17–18 | Agent Conf | Warsaw, PL | Dev Advocates Kourtney Meiss and Anisha Malde are giving a talk, and Giovanni Laquidara is leading a workshop. |
| Sep 24 | React Native Connection | Paris, FR | A React Native community conference we’re attending. |
| Oct 7–9 | Next App Con Berlin | Berlin, DE | Dev Advocate Anisha Malde joins a panel, Giovanni Laquidara leads a workshop, and Moses Roth gives a lightning talk. |
| Oct 21–23 | CityJS Athens | Athens, GR | Dev Advocate Moses Roth is giving a talk. |
| Oct 21–22 | NAB Show New York | New York City, US | The east-coast edition of NAB Show, at the Javits Center. |
| Oct 22–23 | AGNTCon + MCPCon North America | San Jose, US | A Linux Foundation conference for the open agentic AI ecosystem, with MCP and agent-systems tracks. |
| Oct 28–29 | GitHub Universe | San Francisco, US | GitHub’s flagship developer event, focused on collaboration and workflows in the agentic era. |
| Oct 29–31 | React India | Goa, IN | India’s largest React conference, spanning web, mobile, and emerging React platforms. |
Dev Posts
A few things worth reading and watching this week. If you’re eyeing a Vega port, start with the migration walkthrough below, and check out the two AWS Developers videos on building and then observing agents.
Migrating Your Fire OS App to Vega with ADBT
By Siddhesh Pandit
This walkthrough uses Amazon Devices Builder Tools (ADBT), the AI-powered dev suite, to take an existing Fire OS app and move it to Vega OS with the original source as a reference. It’s a practical starting point if you’ve been putting off a Vega port and want to see how much of it the tooling can carry.
How to Build Agents That Write Their Own Tools
Senior Developer Advocate Sandhya Subramani builds an agent that closes its own capability gaps: ask for something outside its toolset and it writes a new tool, tests it, loads it, and uses it live in the same conversation, instead of hand-waving an answer.
An Amazon SVP on writing 100,000 lines of code with AI
By Beth Galetti
SVP of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti hadn’t written code in 25 years, then leaned on AI tools to build and ship 100,000 lines of it. Her piece is a candid read on how AI is widening who gets to build inside a company, alongside the $2.5 billion Amazon is putting toward reskilling its workforce.
Observability for AI Agents
Developer Advocate Elizabeth Fuentes Leone walks three layers of observability for agents built with Strands Agents, which emits OpenTelemetry natively. One method surfaces cycles, token counts, tool timings, and duration; turn on tracing and you get the full step-by-step decision path with tool inputs and outputs attached to each span.
Feedback
Questions or comments? Have an item for next week’s post? Let me know!