(Illustration: Ernest at Taiwan Product Conference 2025. Image source: Bob Chao.)

Witnessing Taiwan’s journey from nascent tech communities blossoming into full-fledged technical conferences, we’ve observed an organic proliferation of product-centric opportunities emerging alongside industrial metamorphosis and the ever-increasing complexity of cross-disciplinary integration. This ecosystem now encompasses the multifaceted spectrum of product operation, product marketing, product design, product management, and product development—a verdant and thriving landscape.

Yet beneath this seemingly lush canopy, one wonders: are we nurturing an organic greenhouse, or merely cultivating a wild tangle of weeds? As we navigate through this labyrinth of uncertainty, none among us possess the definitive answer. But perhaps not knowing is precisely what makes everything possible—it means we can still venture forth to explore, retreat home to experiment, and dare to iterate through our discoveries. On this sweltering weekend, we—a collective of souls orbiting the product ecosystem—gathered at the inaugural Taiwan Product Conference 2025, attempting to forge something meaningful together.

Conference reflections shall be compiled separately.

This piece unfolds in two movements: first, the release of presentation slides, followed by supplementary Q&A elucidations. I warmly invite you to utilize the feedback form found on the final slide to share perspectives from any angle, pose questions, or engage in dialogue. Looking forward to our next shared endeavor.

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(Illustration: AWS Summit Hong Kong 2025 Dev Lounge. Image source: Dorothy.)

✳️ Background

I’m honored to have been selected after submitting my talk proposal—thank you to everyone who has quietly encouraged me along the way :) It’s also a privilege to be part of the 10th anniversary of AWS Summit Hong Kong. Thinking back to 2014, when Lenie, Locarno, and I invited Jeff Barr to Taiwan to deliver a keynote at COSCUP, to supporting the AWS Hero program, and now standing here in Hong Kong sharing with developers and technical managers at the AWS Summit Dev Lounge—it truly feels like a fortunate convergence of serendipity and iterative progress. My heart is full of gratitude.

This talk draws from over a year of experience working with traditional industries, streamlining processes, and modeling object states. It also reflects how our own product and technology integration (PTI) teams have adapted our workflows to collaborate with AI tools (with a fair share of pitfalls along the way). By combining Amazon Q CLI with an AI-augmented perspective on existing processes, we explore the mindset of inviting AI to be a new team member to join us. Like onboarding any new colleague, there will be a period of adjustment—but unless we invite this new teammate (or team?!) of AI to join us, that adaptation can never begin.

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(Illustration: Unbox Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro and reMarkable Paper Pro. Taken at AWS re:Invent 2024, Las Vegas. Image source: Ernest)

Today I spent some time setting up a development environment for the nRF52 DK (PCA10040) board on my macOS Sequoia 15.1.1 machine running on an Apple Macbook Pro M4 Pro (Apple Silicon). This blog post documents the process and can serve as a reference for anyone working with Nordic Semiconductor’s nRF52 DK (development kit).

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tl;dr

• Evolution of AWS services from simple to complex systems
• Introduction of Amazon Aurora D SQL demonstrating strong consistency in globally distributed systems
• Time Synchronization as a new fundamental building block for distributed systems
• Six principles for managing complexity: evolvability, decomposition, organizational alignment, cell-based architecture, predictable design, automation
• Demonstration of complexity management through microservices and cell-based architecture

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tl;dr

• SageMaker evolution: New unified experience combining analytics, ML, and GenAI capabilities
• Bedrock enhancements: New model partnerships (Luma AI, Poolside), prompt optimization features, and advanced RAG capabilities
• Amazon Q improvements: ML model development assistance, business scenario analysis, and developer productivity tools
• Infrastructure optimization: Hyperpod task governance, flexible training plans, and compute resource management
• Security and responsible AI: Enhanced multimodal toxicity detection and automated reasoning checks

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tl;dr

• Announced major compute innovations: Graviton4, Trainium2/3, and P6 instances with NVIDIA Blackwell, delivering significant performance improvements for both general and AI workloads
• Revolutionized storage with S3 Table Buckets for Iceberg tables (3x better query performance) and S3 Metadata for instant data discovery and analytics
• Launched Aurora D SQL and enhanced DynamoDB Global Tables, enabling truly distributed databases with strong consistency and 4x faster performance than competitors
• Introduced Amazon Nova AI model family and enhanced Bedrock with automated reasoning checks and multi-agent collaboration, making GenAI practical for production
• Reimagined SageMaker as a unified platform for data, analytics, and AI with Zero-ETL capabilities, representing a fundamental shift in how enterprises handle data and AI workloads

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tl;dr

• AWS announced Trainium2 Ultra Server - their most powerful AI infrastructure yet, featuring 64 Trainium2 chips working together with Neuron Link technology, providing 5x more compute capacity than any current EC2 AI server and 10x more memory, designed for trillion-parameter AI models.
• AWS introduced latency-optimized inference for Amazon Bedrock, featuring optimized versions of popular models like Llama2 and Claude 3.5 Haiku that run up to 60% faster than standard versions, available immediately in preview.
• AWS unveiled TNP Ten Network - their latest AI-optimized network fabric that can deliver tens of petabytes of network capacity with sub-10 microsecond latency, featuring innovations like trunk connectors and Firefly optic plugs that enable 54% faster installation and improved reliability.

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(Illustration: Amazon Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition. Image source: Amazon Kindle Webpage.)

Following Apple’s sudden release of the iPad Mini (7th generation) ^{1 2}, Amazon has also quickly launched a new color e-paper reader Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition ³.

It seems everyone doesn’t want to miss the year-end Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas shopping seasons. Although I just got the reMarkable Paper Pro, and despite the different orientations (paper vs. books), seeing color e-paper products gradually coming to market still tempts me. For me, it could be more convenient for reading AWS flowcharts, architecture diagrams, and other information. Maybe I’ll wait and see if there are any Black Friday deals.

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(Image source: Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash)

This PHP container was developed, adjusted, and maintained together with a friend and colleague. The original design purpose was to combine php-fpm with nginx, creating a simplified environment that facilitates the operation of Laravel in cloud-native environments, AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS, etc. We use it as a base for teaching and implementing various projects, comparative testing, including comparisons of x86/ARM computing architectures, and more.

With the update and release of new PHP versions, we plan to share the performance tests comparisons we’ve conducted every quarter (if not forgotten) with fellow PHP enthusiasts.

• If you find this container project helpful, we look forward to you applying it to your projects, sharing it with friends, or giving this project a star ⭐ :)
  • The released Docker image is available at Docker Hub: dwchiang/nginx-php-fpm
  • The original Dockerfiles are placed at GitHub: dwchiang/nginx-php-fpm
  • If you are using this container in any project, we welcome you to share your application with us, and let us know how many resources should be planned for this container project.
• If you’re also interested in the topic Running Laravel on Amazon ECS, you might find these resources useful:
  • This self-paced online workshop with complete architecture diagrams: GitHub: dwchiang/laravel-on-aws-ecs-workshops,
  • Or my presentation, which includes slides and a recording: Running Laravel/PHP Container Applications on AWS (AWS Builders Day Taiwan 2022)

Preview

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(Illustration: Preparing to unbox the Remarkable Paper Pro. Image source: Ernest.)

I’ve been eyeing the reMarkable 2 for quite some time, but with an iPad, Apple Pencil, and Amazon Kindle already in hand, it seemed like there might be too much overlap in functionality. Additionally, with rumors of color e-paper products about to bloom everywhere, I kept postponing the purchase. That was until two weeks ago when reMarkable suddenly released the reMarkable Paper Pro. After watching the Launch Event video (2024-09-04), I impulsively placed an order, and two weeks later, I came home to find a box waiting for me :)

Below, I’ll briefly document the various ingenious ideas and details I experienced during the unboxing process from the reMarkable team.

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