!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

What do you call a spider in the jungle?... Amazon Web Services.

At my old job, me and a colleague were tasked with designing a new backup system. It had integrations for database systems, remote file storage and other goodies.
Once we were done, we ran our tests, and sure enough. The files and folder from A were in fact present at B and properly encrypted. So we deployed it.
The next day, after the backup routine had run over night, I got to work and noone was able to log in. They were all puzzled.
I accessed a root account to find the issue. Apparantly, we had made a mistake!
All files on A were present at B... But they were no longer present at A.
We had issued 'move' instead of 'copy' on all the backups. So all of peoples files and even the shared drives have had everything moved to remote storage :D
We spent 4 hours getting everything back in place, starting with the files of the people who were in the office that day.
Boss took it pretty well at least, but not my proudest moment.

*Stay tuned for the story of how I accidentally leaked our Amazon Web Services API key on stack overflow*

/facepalm

When I think how big companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix manage all their services so well (all those load balancings, caching, etc. ), I feel so bad I don't know anything about it. I don't even know how people decide which technology to use. E.g., for a scalable Web app, one can use Node.js or maybe Django (but not definitely Flask, I suppose). Also, which DBMS to use, how to write flawless APIs. You see, I am just beginning my career. Any recommendations (books, videos, etc.) that teach these things? Please help.

"One misstep from developers at Starbucks left exposed an API key that could be used by an attacker to access internal systems and manipulate the list of authorized users," according to the report of Bleeping Computer.

Vulnerability hunter Vinoth Kumar reported and later Starbucks responded it as "significant information disclosure" and qualified for a bug bounty. Along with identifying the GitHub repository and specifying the file hosting the API key, Kumar also provided proof-of-concept (PoC) code demonstrating what an attacker could do with the key. Apart from listing systems and users, adversaries could also take control of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, execute commands on systems and add or remove users with access to the internal systems.

The company paid Kumar a $4,000 bounty for the disclosure, which is the maximum reward for critical vulnerabilities.

Woke up this morning to Amazon charging me over $100 bucks for the web services I used at my Hackathon last month. What the hell, I thought the free tier covered that?

When you spend your day to understand how Amazon Web Services work 😂

My bookmark bar has a random entry for "Clam Poisoning" , between all the Amazon Web Services and Ruby entries. I'm not sure who put it there? It wasn't my wife or I. Should I be worried? Should I avoid all the shellfish for a while?

If Wonder Woman and Spiderman go into business together, they would call it Amazon Web Services

Three-factor authentication:
1. Setup an Amazon.com account.
2. Setup an Amazon Web Services account under the same e-mail address
3. Setup two-factor authentication for both systems.
4. Login to Amazon Web Services in a new browser session, and you'll be required to provide BOTH security tokens at login (Amazon.com first, then AWS second.)

Been working on AWS for about 8 months. Always looked at Cloudformation like an Alien thing. Never thought I'd be the one diving into this Rabbit hole.

But now here I am, 3rd day, trying to Automate the whole infrastructure of my App via Cloudformation.

Amazon Web Services has the worst naming among clouds.

They have "Aurora" and "Athena". Both services relate to data. Both are woman's names. Both start with "A".

Amazon, what's wrong with you?

At my previous company, we used tools from all over the place. We switched between tools at will. Sometimes, some team would decide to use some tool while the rest of the company would use something else. The worst part was that there was no Single-Sign-On (SSO) either. Everyone would need to have an account on all of these said tools. It was chaos.

I realized that being integrated into one environment (even though would have the cost of a vendor-lock-in) was the best option to have because in that case, we wouldn't have to deal with operational hurdles like having integration from one tool to another. They would just come baked-in with the whole environment. That's how GSuite (formerly Google Apps for Work), Atlassian and other players succeeded - they gave a complete suite of services / software that integrated well with each other. You could jump back and forth between services without having to bother about integration with other tools. They'd all be there wherever you wanted them to be. Even cloud providers so that opportunity and built on it - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (in itself).

Another example is a company that used Jira, Confluence and Hipchat but for some dumb reason used Gerrit for their code review / hosting. Eventually, they realized that managing the integration with the Atlassian tools was far more expensive than getting bitbucket and migrating completely into the Atlassian environment.

It's always the integration that matters. Everything else is secondary.

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

Amazon Web Services conference and main question is...

"how do we turn off costs?"

Basically we don't want to pay

Amazon prime days sale...
I find a Fire 7 for $30 instead of $50. I think that would be great to put books on. I am thinking Kindle is an Android type device. Even some searches for Android tablets bring up Kindles on Amazon and web.

I get my kindle and like it. I signed up for trial of Kindle Unlimited. There is almost no selection for Kindle Unlimited for technical books. So I think I can just put the Paktpub app on the Kindle. No app for Kindle. That is okay, I can just put the Play store on there. Technically you can, if you side load it, but it will stop functioning after a day. Not an officially licensed Android device so cannot use Google services.

At this point I am not happy with the Kindle. I got it to read technical books and the selection of technical books is poor. At least on Kindle Unlimited. So I start looking at tablets on Amazon.

I find that there is a serious price breakpoint on Android tablets (cannot get Paktpub app for Windows tablets). For $100 (US) they are not very good. At > $150 they start getting really good feature wise. I end up buying a Samsung tablet for $200. It has 2GB ram and 8 cores at 1.6GHz.

I have been using the tablet for a few days now and am happy with what I can do with it. Now I have to wonder if Kindle is actually an upsell product rather than a serious product. I might not have went for a $200 tablet unless I had not had issues with the Kindle. Not sure there. Amazon made out for both product sales as I just gave the Kindle to the kids.

In the end I am very happy. Paktpub has all the tech books I can handle at the moment. Will probably not consider Kindle Unlimited again. This tells me that competition is good in the book sector. Good for the end user.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

So I’ve spent the last 20 minutes waiting for an Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Pro and another Amazon Web Services WordPress plugin to delete from a server via FileZilla. How’s your day going so far?

Got an email “Welcome to Amazon Web Services” to an old GMail account I no longer use. Seems genuine with no links to shady websites or anything. Does Amazon not verify email addresses or how does that happen?

Also, the mail says I have now 12 months of free tier access, so will they start billing me instead of the random fuck who signed up with my email address?

Does anyone use Amazon Web Services? Do you have an suggestions regarding where to start when coming from the .NET and Azure side of things?

hi guys, I wonder if you can help me, I've been asked by my Line Manager to liase with an app building firm that is going to make an Angular APP and host it on AWS (Amazon Web Services). I've never used AWS before and have no idea what to expect for pricing.

The APP will be educational, questions, answers and resources like slides, text and video etc and available to 400 pupils over 5 schools in place of regular workbooks that they currently use but are unable to due to covid-19.

So that's 2000 pupils all told. What AWS services should I use and what is a fair bill I can expect from them in the UK. The boss is insistent that we have our own AWS account and self host the app when it's done.

I have no experience of this at all so any help will be appreciated. Cheers everyone in advance!

Also the AWS website is a confusing mess and their chat options are not working at the time of posting this lol.