2017 is now over and I want to take a moment to think about how it went for me. This year I:

• Left my Data Engineering role to make courses full time
• Published 3 courses
• Started serverlessfoo.com to showcase fun beginner projects using serverless technologies
• Read 28 books
• Wrote 21 blog posts here on fernandomc.com
• Wrote 2 external articles

I had the good fortune of going to AWS re:Invent this year for the first time and have a few takeaways from the event I’d like to share for folks thinking of going in 2018.

First and foremost, I suggest that if you run into Jeff Barr while wearing a penguin suit be sure to say hello…

I’ve just released a new course on Linux Academy. It’s called Fullstack Serverless Applications on AWS. I think this will be a great course for anyone wanting to learn more about serverless application development on AWS and a great way to add a new project to your portfolio too! You can read more about the course in the official annoucement on the Linux Academy blog.

Over the last few months, I’ve tried to reach someone at my ISP about concerns I have regarding password storage practices. Namely, that they store them in a form that makes them vulnerable to being exposed in plain text in the case of a data breach. After some initial research, I discovered that the issue is actually a with a vendor called CSG International and that the passwords of 56 million user accounts are currently stored improperly.

A little while ago I was working on a Serverless Framework project that needed an easy way to deploy and configure files in S3 as a static website. I didn’t want to do this manually and was hoping to keep the scope of everything within the Serverless Framework. After some back and forth I ended up republishing an outdated npm package as serverless-finch and you’re now welcome to use and contribute to it.