👋 Hi, I'm Yos.

Navigating the idea maze and building for web3 ☀️

Here are my recent thoughts...

Serverless Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

Serverless Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

In this tutorial, we will build a serverless payment application with Stripe and AWS Lambda.

Try the Live Demo!

The source code for both backend and frontend is available on GitHub.

Note that this is a bare-bones implementation and is not production ready.

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Be a Learner

The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

—Eric Hoffer

In our pursuits we should aim to be a learner, not learned.


Show Your Work

Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.

Here are my highlights from Show Your Work! - a book about sharing creativity.

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Knowledge has a Half-life

Knowledge has a half-life.

You should apply it, or it expires.

Either we forget, or that knowledge becomes obsolete.

Knowing something matters less than doing something consistently.


Event-Driven APIs with Webhooks

Software today is becoming increasingly interconnected.

Instead of building things from scratch, an increasing amount of engineering work today is ‘connecting’ prefabricated parts together. We can rely more and more on third party services: businesses that expose an API - a software interface - that other systems connect to and use for services like payments, email, etc.

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The Daily Stoic

We’re not trying to ace tests or impress teachers. We are reading and studying to live, to be good human beings – always and forever.

Here are my highlights from The Daily Stoic, a modern take on Stoic philosophy.

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Beyond JSON

Above is a recorded talk I gave on ‘Beyond JSON: Fantastic Serialization Formats and Where to Find Them’ for API Craft. Slides are available here.

This blog post is an aspirational transcript for the talk. Keep reading for more!

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Recently

Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call “life” was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

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The Clean Coder

What does it mean to be a true software craftsman?

Here are my highlights from The Clean Coder, a code of conduct for professional programmers.

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GraphQL in an Age of REST

Above is a recorded talk I gave on GraphQL at the GeekCamp.sg conference. Slides are available here.

This blog post is an aspirational transcript for the talk. Keep reading for more!

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