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I build a lot of automations. My imagination often runs wild with things I’d like to create and try out, and usually I go build them. But then I have a choice to make: do I maintain them forever or do I abandon them and hope I took some lessons away.
Latest: AWS Step Functions vs Temporal: A Practical Developer Comparison
Episode Summary Have you ever wished you could quit your job and go create content all day long while working for yourself? You can! In this episode, Yan Cui joins Allen Helton to talk about full-time content creation and consultancy within the serverless world. The two discuss Yan’s journey to greatness, weigh in on the use of generative AI in content creation, and cover tips and tricks to get better engagement.
Latest: Becoming a full-time serverless content creator with Yan Cui
Have you ever heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? Well, what if the village was 6 part-time volunteers and the child was a thriving technical community with over 900 members? For the Believe in Serverless (BIS) community, that’s the reality. Getting its start in January, the BIS community had humble beginnings. A slow-rolling Discord server and a once-a-week livestream with a few community members and the community champions. But the community took off real fast, growing the Discord server by hundreds of members over a few months and diving into 3+ live sessions every week. Between day jobs, moderation, event-planning, promo material creation, and social media marketing, the community had quickly run into unsustainable growth. There was no way the 6 of us (Ben Pyle, Danielle Heberling, Andres Moreno, James Eastham, Khawaja Shams, and me) could dedicate the time needed to establish processes and run things consistently.
Last week I was in San Francisco to attend the launch of Postman Flows. It was a fun event focusing on innovative use cases built entirely on Postman’s new visual editor. I walked around from booth to booth talking to different vendors who have built incredibly impressive workflows ranging from online bank management to controlling robotic arms - without a single line of code.
Latest: Is Coding On Its Way Out?
I remember the first time I was asked to give an estimate.
Today is my last day at Tyler Technologies. I’ve been here for just about 11 years.
I make it no secret that I think APIs will literally shape the future of tech. APIs give us access to everything - the lights in our homes, our favorite books, the weather, inventory of the grocery store down the street. Being able to use these APIs as tools enables us to build automations and abstractions that take care of everything in our daily lives without lifting a finger.
In 2023 I spent a lot of time learning about real-time notifications. I learned about the concepts, the different protocols, and how to implement them to seamlessly push updates to a user interface. I won’t claim to be an expert, but I definitely feel comfortable with the different ways to get a message from a server to an end user.
Latest: Building For Interactivity: When Async Is Not Enough
I published my first blog post 7 years ago. I wrote on Medium for about a year before I built Ready, Set, Cloud. For most of its life, the site hasn’t had much of a facelift or performance updates. It’s primarily served as a home for my writing, newsletter, and podcast.
Latest: When serving images from S3 stopped being good enough
I look forward to the first of December every year. Not because we’re squarely in the Christmas season, but because of AWS re:Invent. It’s always a highlight of my year professionally because I get to see a lot of people I interact with in the community in person. In many cases this is the only time of year I get to see them face to face. This year was extra special because I took part in the first-ever “road to re:Invent” hackathon, which put me and 49 other developers on a bus and drove us from LA to Vegas.
Latest: Road to re:Invent Hackathon: How Not to Build a Serverless App
Yesterday was my birthday. I just turned 34, landing me on the soft side of the “mid-30s”. I’ve always had a hard time with birthdays because in my head I have that feeling of “I’m going to be young forever.” But aches, pains, and hangovers are beginning to tell me otherwise.
Latest: Show your personality
I build a lot of automations. My imagination often runs wild with things I’d like to create and try out, and usually I go build them. But then I have a choice to make: do I maintain them forever or do I abandon them and hope I took some lessons away.
Latest: AWS Step Functions vs Temporal: A Practical Developer Comparison
I am a big fan of side projects. I try to work on one almost every single day.
Iteration is important. I’ll say it again. Iteration is important.
I published my first blog post 7 years ago. I wrote on Medium for about a year before I built Ready, Set, Cloud. For most of its life, the site hasn’t had much of a facelift or performance updates. It’s primarily served as a home for my writing, newsletter, and podcast.
Latest: When serving images from S3 stopped being good enough
A few years ago I was the tech lead on an digital evidence application. The app had multiple personas as actors, all of whom would be interacting with evidence at the same time. We got an early version of it out the door and were quickly met with a feature request to keep changes in sync whenever an actor would comment/redact/categorize something.
Latest: AppSync Events Are Great, But Did You Really Need Serverless WebSockets?
Every year I give my brother his Christmas gifts in an untraditional way. It started off as just a way to be funny on Christmas day, but eventually escalated to the point where I make it a whole ordeal.
Latest: I Made the Best Christmas Present Ever... Again. This Time With Alexa, WebSockets, and Mobile Apps
Latest: Cognitive Dissonance
Have you ever heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? Well, what if the village was 6 part-time volunteers and the child was a thriving technical community with over 900 members? For the Believe in Serverless (BIS) community, that’s the reality. Getting its start in January, the BIS community had humble beginnings. A slow-rolling Discord server and a once-a-week livestream with a few community members and the community champions. But the community took off real fast, growing the Discord server by hundreds of members over a few months and diving into 3+ live sessions every week. Between day jobs, moderation, event-planning, promo material creation, and social media marketing, the community had quickly run into unsustainable growth. There was no way the 6 of us (Ben Pyle, Danielle Heberling, Andres Moreno, James Eastham, Khawaja Shams, and me) could dedicate the time needed to establish processes and run things consistently.
I was in a meeting the other day. My team and I had gotten together to discuss the next steps in tackling a giant project ahead of us. I already knew what the outcome of the meeting was going to be. But rather than dictate the plan, I set myself up in the corner of the room and listened.
Last week I ran an experiment. I had a sticky note on my desk labeled “Architecture Diagrams”. Whenever I was in a meeting, if I said I can draw a diagram for that, I wrote a tick mark.
Latest: Solutions Architect Tips - How to Build Your First Architecture Diagram
I’m about to tell you something and I don’t want you to judge me for it. I have a Windows machine. Always have. I’ve never had a Mac or anything Apple, really. Just some Airpods. But my phone is Android, my work laptop is Windows, my home PC is Windows, and I’m not sorry about it.
COVID-19 has hit us all pretty hard. Whether you’re sick, know someone who has been sick, know someone who has passed, lost your job, been furloughed, or been forced to work from home, each and every one of us has been affected at a personal level to some degree.
Latest: How I Built an Automated Text Messaging Ordering System In Less Than A Day
One of the benefits you’ll hear when people pitch you on serverless is that “it handles scaling for you and you never have to worry about it.”
Latest: Building Serverless Applications That Scale The Perfect Amount
ChatGPT and other generative AI services have been around for less than a year and it’s already taken the world over by storm. We see more and more use cases popping up every day on social media showing how these services solve a cool new problem. It’s thrilling to see the surge of innovation pop up seemingly overnight.
Latest: Prompt Engineering: The Future of AI-Driven Development
So you’ve decided to go CI/CD. You read all about the org changes, understand the ins and outs of the development pipeline, and feel confident you can get it done.
Latest: Doing Continuous Delivery? Build A Continuous Changelog with AWS and JIRA
So you’ve decided to go CI/CD. You read all about the org changes, understand the ins and outs of the development pipeline, and feel confident you can get it done.
Latest: Doing Continuous Delivery? Build A Continuous Changelog with AWS and JIRA
I’m about to tell you something and I don’t want you to judge me for it. I have a Windows machine. Always have. I’ve never had a Mac or anything Apple, really. Just some Airpods. But my phone is Android, my work laptop is Windows, my home PC is Windows, and I’m not sorry about it.
A few months ago, I thought it would be cool to add click tracking to my newsletter so I could see which articles I shared were the most popular. Full disclosure, I got the idea from Jeremy Daly. In the off-by-none newsletter, he includes the top 5 articles from each issue plus a few honorable mentions based on the number of clicks they received within the first few days of sending it out.
Latest: How I Built Automatic Click-Tracking and Content Spotlights For My Website
Hey everyone, it’s been a while. I feel like I’ve lived two lifetimes since the last time I posted something. In case you missed it, a few weeks ago I faced the hardest tragedy a parent can go through. I still have no words. It’s an indescribable pain that I genuinely hope nobody reading this will ever go through.
Latest: I'm back!
A few years ago my dad told me he wanted a “chainsaw mill” for Christmas. After learning that meant he wanted a contraption that holds a chainsaw in a way that he can cut logs into dimensional lumber, I asked him for a link so I could do my research.
One of my favorite things to do is build “proof of concepts”. They are quick little apps that show a business problem can be solved in a certain way. They’re quick and dirty and throw caution to the wind. One thing we all know about POC’s is that you should never use them in production.
Webhooks. Some developers love them, some developers hate them. Non-developers love saying it. It’s a fun word. Sounds like something Spiderman would use in a fight.
About two months ago, I shared that my daughter has leukemia. It was an emotional and difficult blog post to write and even more difficult to record. Nobody wants to get the news that a loved one has cancer. Especially a parent hearing that about their 3-year-old (now 4).
Latest: July cancer update
Have you ever heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? Well, what if the village was 6 part-time volunteers and the child was a thriving technical community with over 900 members? For the Believe in Serverless (BIS) community, that’s the reality. Getting its start in January, the BIS community had humble beginnings. A slow-rolling Discord server and a once-a-week livestream with a few community members and the community champions. But the community took off real fast, growing the Discord server by hundreds of members over a few months and diving into 3+ live sessions every week. Between day jobs, moderation, event-planning, promo material creation, and social media marketing, the community had quickly run into unsustainable growth. There was no way the 6 of us (Ben Pyle, Danielle Heberling, Andres Moreno, James Eastham, Khawaja Shams, and me) could dedicate the time needed to establish processes and run things consistently.
This post has been a long time coming. Back in September, I teased about my first impressions of Infrastructure from Code (IfC). Around that time I began an experiment. I wanted to see how people were approaching the Infrastructure from code problem.
Latest: Cognitive Dissonance
I like to think of myself as a good big brother. I offer guidance and advice to my little bro whenever he needs it and listen when he’s having a rough time. But beyond that, I like to give him a particularly fun Christmas every year. Something he can’t get anywhere else.
There’s no doubt that the world has gone async. People no longer wait at loading screens for 30 minutes while their task completes behind the scenes. We’ve figured out how to make delightful experiences that make end users more productive while other things are going on. We know how to maximize our users’ lives.
Latest: Agent Card
Serverless applications are known for a few things. They scale to meet demand, including down to 0. They are fault-tolerant in the event of a transient network outage. They cost almost nothing to run when compared to containers or traditional software deployments in most cases. And they’re known for speed. Serverless applications are fast.
Latest: How a Centralized Cache Elevates Serverless Applications
When you decide to go serverless, be it a personal decision or enterprise-wide, you’re signing up to be a forever student. Modern technology moves fast and keeping up with all the new features, services, and offerings week after week is something that you need to do to stay effective. Cloud vendors are continuously releasing higher and higher abstractions and integrations that make your job as a builder easier. So rather than reinventing the wheel and building something you’ll have to maintain, if you keep up with the new releases, someone may have already done that for you and is offering to maintain it themselves.
Latest: Serverless Postgres with Neon: First Impressions from a Production Mindset
I recently got out of my first death march. Not the kind where the project was destined for failure, but the prolonged period of overwork kind.
Microservice is a funny word. Not in the sense that it sounds funny or is spelled funny. But in the sense that most devs know what it means, yet they have no idea what it actually means.
Latest: Best Practices for Building Serverless Microservices
I build a lot of automations. My imagination often runs wild with things I’d like to create and try out, and usually I go build them. But then I have a choice to make: do I maintain them forever or do I abandon them and hope I took some lessons away.
Latest: AWS Step Functions vs Temporal: A Practical Developer Comparison
Episode Summary Platform engineering is a trending topic in cloud communities these days. Does it replace DevOps? Is it really “the next new thing?”
Latest: A Deep Dive Into Platform Engineering With Ran Isenberg
A few years ago I was the tech lead on an digital evidence application. The app had multiple personas as actors, all of whom would be interacting with evidence at the same time. We got an early version of it out the door and were quickly met with a feature request to keep changes in sync whenever an actor would comment/redact/categorize something.
Latest: AppSync Events Are Great, But Did You Really Need Serverless WebSockets?
Latest: Agent Card
Earlier this year I released an AI-powered fitness app focused on creating tailored workouts using equipment you have at your disposal. It was pretty good, but inadvertently was geared toward how I exercise. Not great for general usage.
Latest: How to Process Stripe Subscriptions In Your Serverless Apps
A few years ago my dad told me he wanted a “chainsaw mill” for Christmas. After learning that meant he wanted a contraption that holds a chainsaw in a way that he can cut logs into dimensional lumber, I asked him for a link so I could do my research.
The internet is buzzing with chatter on AI right now, myself included. Specifically what has caught my eye and attention is the model context protocol (MCP). MCP is a standard that allows large language models (LLMs) to work with tools (code) to perform tasks.
Earlier this year I released an AI-powered fitness app focused on creating tailored workouts using equipment you have at your disposal. It was pretty good, but inadvertently was geared toward how I exercise. Not great for general usage.
Latest: How to Process Stripe Subscriptions In Your Serverless Apps
Latest: Agent Card
A few years ago my dad told me he wanted a “chainsaw mill” for Christmas. After learning that meant he wanted a contraption that holds a chainsaw in a way that he can cut logs into dimensional lumber, I asked him for a link so I could do my research.
I’m a software engineer and writer focused on building practical cloud and AI systems with community.
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