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 · 15/05/2025

Dude, this is amazing and thank you so much for your support over the last 12 months!

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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 · 17/01/2025

did he say what caused the spike?

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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

If you liked this, then you might also enjoy the tips and tutorials I publish every week about AWS and serverless. Subscribe to my free newsletter and level up your AWS game: theburningmonk.com/subscribe

theburningmonk.com

Learn to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS

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

You can also put CloudFront in front of your API and cache and handle these preflight requests at a lower cost. This doesn’t eliminate preflight request-related charges entirely, but it goes a long way to minimize it.

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

But for personal projects or side hustles, where margins are tight, cutting these unnecessary costs can make a meaningful difference.

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

Of course, subdomains aren’t inherently bad, and many organizations prefer them to organize multiple APIs and environments. And maybe even let teams have their own subdomains and allow them to be more autonomous.

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

Now, here’s the thing that surprises most folks. Even if your API is hosted on a subdomain, e.g. api.example.com, the browser still sees it as a cross-origin request from example.com. Moving the API to example.com/api will eliminate the need for preflight requests altogether.

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

Every time the browser makes a cross-origin request, it first makes a preflight request to make sure it can actually send the request. Since API Gateway charges per request, you’re billed for both the preflight and the main request.

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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

I saw some WAF charges on my bill and it took me a while to work out where they came from because I couldn't see any web ACLs in the WAF console! To see if you have any classic web ACLs, go to the WAF Classic console: buff.ly/4gElXQa and either delete or migrate them before Sep 30, 2025.

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

AWS WAF Classic (or v1) was recently deprecated, and classic Web ACLs no longer appear in the new WAF console. So it's easy to miss any classic web ACLs you have that are no longer in use, especially if you don't spend much time in the AWS console because you do everything through IaC!

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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

Enjoy the shrimp cruise!

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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

We only ran ads on Meta platforms, and the numbers looked ok, but almost no conversion. The 10k was just paying the ad agency to help put the ad together, monitor its performance, tune it, find different audience, etc. Prob spent another 4-5k on ad spend as well. Very expensive lesson!

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

Here’s what I learned (the hard way)... 1) Online ads are easy to measure, but they are not always the most effective channels. 2) Clicks is a bullsh*t metric; don't get distracted by it. 3) Trust beats clicks/impressions. The most powerful marketing comes from relationships, not campaigns.

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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

It was another FaaS that had in-process concurrency to begin with, interesting tech, but maybe too early. They focused more on the data eng space because not many people were using Lambda at scale yet, so the kind of optimization problem they were solving just wasn't commonplace.

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

And that's where I hope they'd copy Vercel functions (and other earlier examples of this, like Binaris) and introduce in-process concurrency, so you can get more out of the Lambda workers. That'd solve a lot of these cost concerns of using Lambda at scale.

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

As far as cost is concerned, very rarely is Lambda an issue, other things like CloudWatch and even API Gateway or VPC-related costs show up long before Lambda itself. Having said that.. there are use cases where Lambda will legit be expensive, e.g. high traffic websites

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