Introduction
After the 2023 summer break, while preparing for the next academic year, I had a meeting with Sébastien Stormacq from AWS to discuss a potential internship for one of my students from HOGENT (my employer). Sébastien was more than happy to arrange an internship for 2024. When I announced this offer to my students, we quickly found a suitable candidate: Marwane Koutar.
In this post, I'd like to showcase the work Marwane did during his internship.
The internship
The goal for Marwane's internship was to simplify the development of AWS Lambda functions in Swift. While Swift originated as a language for development on Apple platforms, it also has a large ecosystem of libraries for server-side development, and offers a lot of benefits in terms of security, performance, and interoperability.
Unfortunately, Swift is not natively supported on AWS yet, so Marwane's task was to build a tool to simplify the development and deployment of AWS Lambda functions written in Swift.
During his internship, Marwane developed an extension for Visual Studio Code that uses a set of templates to facilitate the build, test, and deploy process of lambda functions. The extension was written in TypeScript using Vite + React for the UI, and builds on top of the Swift AWS Lambda Runtime and AWS SAM.
Marwane also attended the AWS Summit in Paris. This was a nice bonus, as students don't often get the opportunity to attend a conference this big.
Marwane's extension is published to the Visual Studio Code Marketplace and the source code is available in the following repositories:
Presenting the results
After an internal presentation at AWS, Marwane presented his work to the Swift Server Work Group, of which Sébastien is a member.
We also encouraged Marwane to submit a lightning talk for the ServerSide.swift conference. His proposal was accepted, but unfortunately, Marwane was unable to attend the conference. Fortunately, Sébastien was able to showcase Marwane's work in his talk on "Swift, Server-Side, Serverless". A recording of this talk is available below.