Musings on IT and programming

On the last months I had a couple of the most aggressive interviews on my current job hunt.  It started with one of the interviewers stating that I was being recorded and that all answers should be provided from the top of my head, that if I looked elsewhere it would be considered as cheating and against my candidacy.  Wait what? Are you serious?  This is a senior or staff level position.  If you do not trust me to even do an interview why start this process at all?  Then while talking about technology we were discussing concepts and this same individual starts to talk about specifics and "educates" the candidate and tells me to validate this afterwards.  Come on, of course I will not contradict you, but if this is the kind of culture you are allowing count me out. Then on to systems design on whiteboard. Here I'm asking lots of questions regarding the domain and all they answer is to make an assumption. Then they start asking how to develop the solution bu...

 As of late there has been a couple of blips around 10x developers.My take is that a lot is missing for many of us. There is chance that you have worked with a 10x developer but by the context where you were interacting that 10x was negated. It might be a process that is impeding the multiplier, lack of guidance or north star or many other factors. One that is almost never taken into account is having two or more 10x developers with competing characteristics that essentially negate each other. This I believe is the worst case scenario as it can cause frustration on multiple levels. Also it can potentially be that the 10x individuals are not aware of them being the cause of this situation. A cycle of constant feedback among team members and across teams is needed in order to pinpoint this case. The way to solve this negating situation is difficult as it might mean changing way of working in not so subtle ways, a lot of coaching and uncovering of situations that may be hidden in plai...

  his is the sixth post on information vault taken from John Crickett coding exercises. In this installment encryption for Private Data is added and also the retrieval of said data in plain text for when there is need for it. With this simple code it is almost unreasonable to have plaintext Private Data while using AWS DynamoDb, the downside is that full text search is not possible on these fields so a different approach is needed. All the code can be found on. https://github.com/mtzmontiel/dip-data-vault To continue from previous posts which can be found here: Post 1 -  Problem Statement Post 2 - Security Context Post 3 - API Design (initial) Post 4 - Initial code - Behavior Driven Development against mocks Post 5 - Implementation part 1 Now to add actual Private Data Storing with Encryption I’ll be using DynamoDb Encryption Client which uses AWS Key Management System as materials provider for encryption. First we need to define the Customer Managed Key that will be used, thi...