iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/07/2025

TIL web neural network API, an emerging web standard for building in-browser AI apps that lets you use those new NPUs in phones and laptops. w3.org/TR/webnn

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Reposted by Yan Cui

Charity Majors @charity.wtf · 27/05/2025

I have not paid a ton of attention to the uproar over RTO policies, bc we are all in on distributed teams and not going back. My impression (via social media) has been that these were shadow layoffs. Last month I asked an investor why they are doing RTO. He said: "Retention, mostly. And morale."

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 11/04/2025

Saying "coding is dead" is missing the point. Coding isn’t just about producing code, it’s also a way of thinking. It teaches us structure, systems thinking, abstractions and problem decomposition. If you don’t learn those skills, AI won’t make you productive, it’ll make you dependent.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 07/04/2025

I finally binged The Orville, it was time well spent, especially seasons 2 and 3! So high on Star Trek nostalgia right now 😅

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 02/04/2025

I recently spoke with Waldemar Hummer to find out what's new in LocalStack v4 - e.g. visualize and trace event-driven arch end-to-end, or create snapshots of your system. It's crazy how fast they are innovating! youtu.be/vVUBnXD6eto

youtu.be

Introducing LocalStack v4

YouTube video by Master AWS with Yan

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/03/2025

Through chaos experiments, the Lambda team reduced response time to an AZ outage by 90%! 🤯

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/03/2025

"Lambdaliths have slower cold starts" "Lambdaliths have fewer cold starts" Both can be true, but neither is entirely correct. It depends on several factors. In my new post, I explain these nuances so you can make a better choice. theburningmonk.com/2025/03/the-...

theburningmonk.com

The pros and cons of Lambdalith

Learn about lambdalith and how it helps you build serverless APIs with AWS Lambda, as well as its pros and cons.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 12/03/2025

I spoke with Khawajas Shams about building large-scale (think millions of TPS) multi-tenant systems. We talked about pros & cons of cell-based architectures, how it reduces the blast radius, and techniques for building high-throughput systems e.g. core pinning www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jte...

youtube.com

How to Build a Multi-Tenant System (Best Practices)

YouTube video by Master AWS with Yan

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 20/02/2025

Nice to see a full house at the serverless days Manchester 💪

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 13/02/2025

Thank you to everyone who attended my talk at the Serverless London meetup last night 🙏 Here are my slides for those who couldn't make it. You can try Evolua for free at evolua.io. We'd appreciate your feedback! speakerdeck.com/theburningmo...

speakerdeck.com

How we built an AI code reviewer with serverless and Bedrock

Slides for my talk at the Serverless London meetup on 12-Feb-2025

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 31/01/2025

New post: How we built an AI code reviewer with serverless and Bedrock My biggest lesson learnt is that, at least for our use case, LLM is the easy part and there's still a lot of "app" in an "AI-powered app"!

buff.ly

How we built an AI code reviewer with serverless and Bedrock

Explore the high-level architecture of Evolua, an AI code reviewer built with Bedrock and serverless technologies, and what we learnt

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 29/01/2025

I spoke with the co-founder of @hookdeck.com to find out what it can do, and it's impressive! There is a lot of focus on DX for building Event-Driven Architecture, and EventBridge can learn a lot from them. Have a look for yourself. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jmM...

youtube.com

Hookdeck has built a better Developer Experience than EventBridge

YouTube video by Yan Cui

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 22/01/2025

This is AWESOME!! EventBridge now delivers events to cross-account targets directly without having to send them to the default bus in the target account first. More details here: aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 18/01/2025

Here's a mindmap of everything we'll cover in my 4-week boot camp starting on Monday. Are we missing anything that one should know for running serverless workloads in production? Detailed curriculum here: productionreadyserverless.com#curriculum

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 17/01/2025

We're back with a new episode of real-world serverless. I spoke with @boyney123.bsky.social about the hard parts of building event-driven architectures and how EventCatalog can help with event documentation, discovery, versioning, visualization and testing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVl7...

youtube.com

EventCatalog REVOLUTIONIZES Governance in Event-Driven Architectures | ft. David Boyne

YouTube video by Yan Cui

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/01/2025

oh, this is a toughie...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 10/01/2025

Stop wasting money on CORS preflight requests. Here's a quick tip for reducing API Gateway costs. 👇

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Reposted by Yan Cui

Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 08/01/2025

Confessions of a Big Tech and startups recruiter: with Blake Stockman. Blake has been a tech recruiter for 12 years, working at Google, Meta, Uber, Flexport, Y Combinator and startups. Full episode: • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6sA6... • YouTube: youtu.be/d7GsnaQYZ68 (cont'd)

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 09/01/2025

This is still my favourite answer to "What does a software architect do?" Source: youtube.com/watch?v=FGKG...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 06/01/2025

Current status: working on Terraform track for productionreadyserverless.com ✅ Set up TF project & serverless.tf ✅ Support multi-account ✅ REST APIs with API Gateway and Lambda ✅ Testing with ephemeral environments ⃣ Event-Driven Architectures ⃣ Observability & performance

productionreadyserverless.com

Production-Ready Serverless

Learn BEST PRACTICES for building production-ready serverless applications.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 05/01/2025

I'm speaking at AWS Community Day Romania this April, in the beautiful city of Timisoara. Hope to see you there 👋 Their CFP is open until February, so there's still time to submit your talk. More details here: aws-community.ro

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 03/01/2025

You might be paying for unused WAF ACLs that you can't see. Here's what I found in my latest bill. 👇

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 31/12/2024

2024 was the year I got healthy 💪 and got back amongst the community. And it felt great! Here's what I got up to in 2024 and my most popular content: theburningmonk.com/2024/12/year... Wish you all a happy new year and hope to catch you in 2025! Ciao for now 👋

theburningmonk.com

Year in review, 2024

Take a look back at my 2024 - launched 2 MVPs, 33 new articles, 31 public talks, 16 podcasts, 8.9 million LinkedIn impressions, and more.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 30/12/2024

I just burned $10,000 on marketing, and it taught me the hardest lesson of my career. I spent $10,000 on an ad agency and only got 3 sign-ups for my workshop, despite months of ad campaigns and plenty of clicks. Yet, 30% of students joined through word of mouth, another 30% through social media.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 29/12/2024

Do you build mulit-region applications on AWS? Then bookmark this page of AWS services and their multi-region capabilities. repost.aws/articles/AR0...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 28/12/2024

An eng manager at Netflix once told me that "It'd cost 7x to run Netflix if Netflix ran on Lambda". But what he said next was even more insightful. "But, not everything at Netflix runs at Netflix scale." And that's true for most enterprises!

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 27/12/2024

When you use fetch in Node 20 or later, the X-Ray SDK doesn't propagate trace headers downstream. If you have a Lambda -> API Gateway -> Lambda, the two invocations will not appear in the same trace. This is the two-line fix you need. (you need to install the aws-xray-sdk-fetch module first)

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Reposted by Yan Cui

Peter Smith @petersmith.net · 26/12/2024

Hey look at that... one of @theburningmonk.com's top podcast episodes of 2024 was about LocalStack. Maybe we should take a look... (it's at v4 these days). www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP2U...

youtube.com

LocalStack v3 is here and it's kinda amazing!

YouTube video by Yan Cui

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 25/12/2024

"I just got disowned 'cause you made him believe I'm a Java dev!" 😂 😂 😂 www.youtube.com/shorts/TwXu4...

youtube.com

Exposed

YouTube video by Pirate Software

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 22/12/2024

Current status: refreshing content for my Jan 2025 workshop ✅ Update Serverless Framework track to v4 ✅ Update to ESM modules ✅ Update SSM vs. Secrets Manager comparison ✅ Jest -> Vitest ✅ Update SNS vs. SQS vs. EventBridge vs. Kinesis comparison ✅ More details on remocal testing

productionreadyserverless.com

Production-Ready Serverless

Learn BEST PRACTICES for building production-ready serverless applications.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 19/12/2024

[New Post] How to end-to-end test microservices across bounded contexts? Here, I discussed the pros and cons of several approaches and explained why I prefer using mock APIs instead of hosting other teams' microservices. Enjoy! theburningmonk.com/2024/12/how-...

theburningmonk.com

How to end-to-end test microservices across bounded contexts?

Learn how to handle end-to-end tests involving multiple microservices and ensure their correct functioning and adherence to contracts.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 18/12/2024

Skype is pushing everyone to a subscription model for voip phone calls. Are there any alternatives that's still pay-as-you-go? I looked at a few, like Viber, but they are all subscriptions-based as well.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 17/12/2024

There is still coupling in Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs)! Coupling means changes on one side have to propagate to the other side and it can be measured in multiple dimensions. Even in EDAs, there are multiple forms of coupling:

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Allen Helton @readysetcloud.io · 16/12/2024

Serverless Picks of the Week #142! Our serverless🦸‍♂️is Philipp Krenn, DA and community lead at Elastic! Philipp really understands the hard part of serverless data, and does a🔥job explaining it to others. Thank you for everything you do, Philipp 💙! www.readysetcloud.io/newsletter/142

readysetcloud.io

Ready, Set, Cloud!

The community is resting after an intense week at AWS re:Invent, more than likely gearing up for some cool new projects in 2025.

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 13/12/2024

I've uploaded a new video on CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), which explains what it is, how to implement the pattern, when to use it, and its pros & cons. Watch it here: buff.ly/4giqGqH I'd love your feedback in the comments!

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CQRS Explained in 4 Mins | What is CQRS? Pros & Cons

This is a preview lesson from my upcoming workshop, "Production-Ready Serverless". If you liked this, then please check out the full curriculum at https://pr...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 12/12/2024

Hackers stole over two terabytes of sensitive data, but they put the data in an open S3 bucket and that's how they got caught. Oh, the irony... hackread.com/shinyhunters...

hackread.com

ShinyHunters, Nemesis Linked to Hacks After Leaking Their AWS S3 Bucket

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 11/12/2024

Excellent guide on writing useful error messages: * Use the correct status codes * Be descriptive * Be helpful * Provide elaborative information * Be empathetic Read the full article for some examples:

buff.ly

Designing APIs for humans: Error messages

Good error message, bad error message Error messages are like letters from the tax...

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Yan Cui @theburningmonk.com · 11/12/2024

ICYMI, my next serverless workshop is going to include a new Terraform track. That's 3 courses for the price of 1! 👉 buff.ly/2JVuG1o ps. early bird (30% off) tickets are available until Dec 16th