Amazon Q Developer Tips: No.4 No AWS account needed

In this series I will be sharing daily hints and tips to help you get ahead and start to accelerate you on your own journey. Each day I will share something new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips, or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly. Check out the previous tips here.

Ok, time for today’s tip….

Tip 4 - Setting yourself up for success: No AWS account needed - grab your BuilderID

Did you know that you did not need an AWS account to use Amazon Q Developer? That’s right, you head me correctly - there is no need for you to have or use an existing AWS account to gain access to Amazon Q Developer.

So how does this work then? All you need to do is sign up for a BuilderID using an email address, and claim your BuilderID alias. Once you have this, you can use that to log into the Amazon Q Developer plugin.

Check out the workflow - its very straightforward.

Once you have registered your BuilderID, after installing the Amazon Q Developer plugin, you can then use the Free BuilderID login button to start using Amazon Q Developer. As I write this, we have just announced even more cool features that Amazon Q Developer can help you with. /test, /doc, and /review are all new capabilities that are really going to help developers.

Does more than just AWS stuff

The great news is that you can use Amazon Q Developer to help you with LOTS of things, not just AWS stuff. For example, you can use it to help you with coding tasks across many different programming languages and frameworks (I was even able to get it to program 6502 assembly language for a 40 year old computer, which you can read about in my post, Back to the future: Writing 6502 assembler with Amazon Q Developer).

If you are learning programming languages, then Amazon Q Developer can help you understand, code, debug, and optimise code as you learn. It is a really great companion that can help shed light on things that perhaps a tutorial or walk through fails to cover. As an example, I recently followed a tutorial and kept getting an error, which previously might have stopped me. I was able to use Amazon Q Developer to troubleshoot the issue I was having and get past it. In the process I actually ended up learning MORE about the technology I was learning about as I was able to use Amazon Q to help me resolve that problem. I see a lot of folks finding tools like Amazon Q helpful in this way.

Your BuilderID also unlocks more than just Amazon Q Developer. Once you have your BuilderID you can:

• join and participate in the AWS Community and re:Post communities
• access a wide range of training courses via the AWS Skill Builder

We will also be adding more things over time, so what this space.

What are the differences?

You might be wondering what the difference between using your AWS account and the BuilderID to log in to Amazon Q Developer. The good news is that you get the same great functionality when using BuilderID, just with some lower service limits. It is worth spending a few minutes to review the key differences between the capabilities and service limits available.

You can review the pricing page, to explore what some of those differences and capabilities are (auto security scanning, the ability to create custom models based on your own code), as well as service limits (the number of times you can use Amazon Q Developer Agent for software development, the number of lines of code you can submit for security scans, etc).

Try Amazon Q Developer today, and claim your free Builder ID

You can try Amazon Q Developer for free today, by signing up for a Builder ID. You can also check out my other posts on community.aws, as I have been sharing a lot of tips and use cases of how I am using Amazon Q Developer. You can also keep up to date with all the new features and improvements of Amazon Q Developer by checking out the changelog.

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