Topher's AWS Blog

Weekly Email Newletter *In Progress*

TL;DR:Sending a weekly email to subscribed emails through my hosted domain.

Key Takeaways

• Sending emails through a domain requires Domain validation that takes up to several days and can delay workloads.
• The lambda function pulls the latest weekly template and then pulls email and name data to use as placeholders in the email template.
• Currently trying to implement the API step of this project as I am unsure if I wanted to only allow the API access to update the list or also the weekly template.

Project Description

This project was more of a fun thing I wanted to do for my family and send weekly emails to with either a funny story or inside joke. In its current state, it does work without the API gateway, however, I thought it would be a good integration and more of a real-world use case to build this into the project even though I can easily add emails to the DynamoDB table manually. Obviously, this wouldn't scale if this was something that hundreds or thousands of people signed up for, so I thought it worth building in.


The lambda code itself was something I had the help of ChatGPT with. As much as I love coding on my own, it is still my achilles heel when doing these projects as it often delays me longer than I like and with my limited time, I thought it was best to focus on the overall implementation of the project, after all, it is supposed to be fun and not a chore. The rest of this project was relatively straight forward in configuring but building upon this further and completing the API gateway integration is my priority for seeing this through.