Yan Cui

10 July 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

Yan Cui reposted

Charity Majors

@charity.wtf

26 May 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."

theburningmonk.comHow to use Neon and ephemeral environments to simplify serverless developmentUnderstand the value of ephemeral environments, and how you can use Neon and ephemeral environments to simplify serverless development

2 May 2025

I've been diving into Neon and I like what I see! Here's how you can use Neon with ephemeral environments to simplify serverless development. theburningmonk.com/2025/04/how-...

11 Apr 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.

7 Apr 2025

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

youtu.beIntroducing LocalStack v4YouTube video by Master AWS with Yan

2 Apr 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

:-P

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

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

27 Mar 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-...

youtube.comHow to Build a Multi-Tenant System (Best Practices)YouTube video by Master AWS with Yan

12 Mar 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...

20 Feb 2025

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

speakerdeck.comHow we built an AI code reviewer with serverless and BedrockSlides for my talk at the Serverless London meetup on 12-Feb-2025

13 Feb 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...

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

31 Jan 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"!

wiz.ioWiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History | Wiz BlogA publicly accessible database belonging to DeepSeek allowed full control over database operations, including the ability to access internal data. The exposure includes over a million lines of log str...

30 Jan 2025

Wiz found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data like chat history 🤦‍♂️ www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-res...

youtube.comHookdeck has built a better Developer Experience than EventBridgeYouTube video by Yan Cui

29 Jan 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...

aws.amazon.comYan Cui | AWS Serverless HeroConnect with Yan Cui, experienced engineer, AWS user since 2009, and frequent author of serverless-focused topics.

29 Jan 2025

AWS Hero status renewed for another two years 😇 aws.amazon.com/developer/co...

22 Jan 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...

18 Jan 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

youtube.comEventCatalog REVOLUTIONIZES Governance in Event-Driven Architectures | ft. David BoyneYouTube video by Yan Cui

17 Jan 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...

oh, this is a toughie...

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

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.

theburningmonk.comSubscribeLearn to build production-ready serverless applications on AWS

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com

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.

Yan Cui reposted

Gergely Orosz

8 Jan 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)

9 Jan 2025

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

productionreadyserverless.comProduction-Ready ServerlessLearn BEST PRACTICES for building production-ready serverless applications.

6 Jan 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

5 Jan 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

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

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: https://buff.ly/4gElXQa and either delete or migrate them before Sep 30, 2025.

buff.lyMigrating a web ACL from AWS WAF Classic to AWS WAF - AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Shield AdvancedTo migrate a web ACL and switch over to it, perform the automated migration, then complete a series of manual steps.

And if you need to migrate them to AWS WAF v2, then here's a handy migration guide: https://buff.ly/4gKjuDZ Ok, hope this helps you save a few $$!

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

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!

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

31 Dec 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 👋

30 Dec 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.

30 Dec 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.

29 Dec 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...

28 Dec 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!

But outside of that critical path, Lambda was used heavily across many workloads, including critical business areas like payment processing & account management. Even some services on the critical path were able to use Lambda and API Gateway because their API responses were highly cacheable.