Valentin Kao
Senior Software Engineer and AWS Solutions Architect based in Taiwan, originally from Toulouse, France. I build production systems from scratch: serverless backends, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered applications.
I've built an IoT platform that scaled to 2M devices at 500+ req/s, a FinTech app backend serving handling real money transactions, and production AI systems including voice interview agents and automated data extraction.
I work as a freelance engineer and consultant. If you need someone to own your backend, infrastructure, and AI stack end-to-end, from architecture to production, that's what I do.
When I'm not building software, I'm recharging with Muay Thai, lifting, or running.
What I do
Cloud & serverless backends: AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, ECS Fargate, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions
AI in production: OpenAI, Claude, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, LiveKit voice agents, RAG pipelines, multi-LLM routing
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform + Terragrunt, AWS CDK, SAM, CloudFormation
Backend: Node.js, NestJS, FastAPI, Python, TypeScript, WebSocket APIs, event-driven systems
Frontend & mobile: React, Next.js, React Native + Expo, Tailwind CSS
Data & integrations: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Kinesis, IoT (LoRaWAN, Sigfox, BLE), Stripe, third-party APIs
Experience
FinTech platforms (Cagn'Up, DealBreaker). NestJS, ECS Fargate, Terraform
Multi-tenant IoT SaaS with Bedrock AI. Led team of 4, AWS CDK, 31 nested stacks
IoT middleware for 2M devices. Built and led team of 7, ISO 27001 certified
AI code review SaaS. Multi-LLM routing, 40% cost reduction vs. single-provider
Education
Available for freelance projects and consulting. Reach out, or check out my work.
This is a collection of ideas, stories, tutorials, and whatever come to my mind. Better sharing them than keeping them into a Notion privately.
May 1, 2026
OpenAI Got Out of Azure Lock-In. Anthropic Doubled Down on AWS. Same Week.
Apr 30, 2026
I Realized at 35,000 Feet That I Can't Code Without an LLM Anymore
Apr 29, 2026
@bitwarden/cli Got Compromised at the Publishing Step. The Install Step Is the Wrong Place to Defend.
Apr 28, 2026
AWS Just Made Custom Agent Orchestration Indefensible. Three API Calls.
Apr 27, 2026
Carnegie Mellon Found 6 Million Fake GitHub Stars: The 117,000x ROI Problem
Apr 24, 2026
How a Single GitHub Issue Title Poisoned 4,000 npm Installs
Apr 24, 2026
Anthropic's Claude Code Regression Was Never About the Model
Apr 23, 2026
The Vercel Breach Traces Back to a Roblox Cheat on a Context AI Laptop
Apr 22, 2026
Atlassian Opts 300,000 Customers Into AI Training Based on Pricing Tier
Apr 21, 2026
AWS Lambda Stops Patching Node.js 20 on April 30: The Three-Phase Deadline
Apr 20, 2026
Claude Opus 4.7 Is Smarter and More Expensive to Work With
Apr 17, 2026
The $18K Lambda Bill Is a Pattern Problem, Not a Serverless Problem
Apr 16, 2026
80K Tech Layoffs, 67K Open Engineering Roles: Q1 2026 Split the Market
Apr 15, 2026
GitHub Ships Stacked PRs: The Monolith Diff Was Always the Wrong Review Unit
Apr 14, 2026
Claude Mythos Found a 27-Year-Old OpenBSD Bug: Your Patch Window Just Collapsed
Apr 13, 2026
AI Agent Time Horizons Double Every 4 Months, Review Capacity Stays Flat
Apr 10, 2026
Claude Mythos Escaped Its Sandbox, Then Wiped the Git History
Apr 9, 2026
LinkedIn Scans Every Visitor's Browser for 6,200 Chrome Extensions
Apr 8, 2026
S3 Files Goes GA: Amazon S3 Is Now Mountable as a File System
Apr 7, 2026
North Korea's UNC1069 Deepfaked a Founder to Backdoor Axios on npm
Apr 6, 2026
CVE-2025-55182 Weaponized: 766 Next.js Hosts Breached in 24 Hours
Apr 4, 2026
Claude Code Auto Mode: The Agent Now Decides Which Commands Are Safe
Apr 3, 2026
Claude Code Now Decides Which Commands Are Safe. That Is the Whole Game.
Apr 3, 2026
The Cognitive Dark Forest: Open Source in the Age of AI Absorption
Apr 2, 2026
Claude Code Source Leak: AutoDream, ULTRAPLAN, and Anti-Copying Fake Tools
Apr 2, 2026
The Cognitive Dark Forest: Your Open-Source Strategy Just Became a Competitive Risk
Apr 1, 2026
Anthropic Data: AI Power Users Succeed 10 Percent More Than New Adopters
Mar 31, 2026
TeamPCP's Five-Day PyPI Supply-Chain Campaign Against AI Tooling
Mar 30, 2026
AI Coding ROI Is Bimodal: Microsoft, Claude Code, and a $500K JSONata Rewrite
Mar 27, 2026
Google's DORA Report: 90 Percent Use AI, Delivery Metrics Stay Flat
Mar 26, 2026
AWS Lambda Managed Instances: AWS Admits Serverless Has a Ceiling
Mar 25, 2026
Stripe and Visa Launch the Machine Payments Protocol for AI Agents
Mar 24, 2026
Walmart's ChatGPT Checkout Converted 3x Worse: What Agentic Commerce Breaks
Mar 23, 2026
MCP Is Losing to the Command Line: Tokens, Reliability, and Cost
Mar 20, 2026
Dispatch vs OpenClaw: The Real AI Agent Battle Is the Permission Model
Mar 20, 2026
OpenAI Now Owns Ruff, uv, and ty: Python's Toolchain Is an AI Distribution Channel
Mar 19, 2026
How a Lambda Extension Cut Our CloudWatch Bill by 70 Percent
Mar 18, 2026
McKinsey's AI Platform Fell to a 2003-Era SQL Injection
Mar 17, 2026
Amazon Mandates Senior Sign-Off on AI Code: The Review Bottleneck Is Real
Mar 16, 2026
Anthropic's Flat 1M Token Pricing Makes Half of RAG Pipelines Optional
Mar 12, 2026
ES2026 Math.sumPrecise Will Not Fix the Rounding Bug That Actually Costs Money
Mar 11, 2026
From First Engineer to Tech Lead: What Scaling Yourself Actually Looks Like
Mar 6, 2026
The Three AI Agent Patterns: Single, Sequential, and Parallel
Mar 5, 2026
Lambda Durable Execution Is Not a Step Functions Killer
Mar 4, 2026
GitHub Copilot Now Ships Claude, GPT-5.3, and Codex: Model Routing Is Commodity
Mar 3, 2026
Amazon's Kiro Did Not Delete Production: The Real Cause Was IAM
Mar 2, 2026
Tailwind Docs Traffic Down 40 Percent: Vibe Coding Is Starving Open Source
Feb 27, 2026
Why No Framework Is Still a Framework Choice: Express vs NestJS
Feb 26, 2026
Karpathy Retires Vibe Coding for Agentic Engineering
Feb 25, 2026
Ramp Data: AI Split the Freelance Market, It Did Not Replace It
Feb 24, 2026
Claude Code Security Found 500+ Bugs That Decades of Expert Review Missed
Feb 23, 2026
AGENTS.md Files Cut Agent Success Rates and Raise Costs by 20 Percent
Feb 19, 2026
Context Engineering Is FinOps for AI: The Real Cost Driver Isn't the Model
Feb 18, 2026
Scaling 2M IoT Devices on Lambda: When to Move the Hot Path to Containers
Feb 17, 2026
AWS Quietly Raised SQS, Lambda, and EventBridge Payloads to 1MB
Feb 12, 2026
Infrastructure as Code Is the 2026 Professional Baseline, Not a Nice to Have
Feb 10, 2026
Why Hardcoding LLM Model IDs Is Technical Debt with a Deprecation Clock
Nov 10, 2023
Staying in Taiwan with a Taiwan Gold Card
Oct 23, 2023
Serverless Computing for a Modern-Day Development
Oct 2, 2023
From being Software Engineer into leading a team of 6 engineers