Summary of important things that I did in 2024

• I opened for myself mindfulness practice.
• I reduced my weight from 96 to 86 kg.
• I found a new job as SRE Lead at Agoda.
• I rearranged my “work from home” office room to have a better working place.
• I added more pictures to my yearly review to illustrate what was done.

Summary of important things that I did in 2023

• I organized Ukrainian IT Fridays for Ukrainian IT Professionals in Bangkok.
  • Photos
• I fixed my eye-sight with ReLEX SMILE surgery.
• I renewed my car and motorcycle driving licenses.
• I started to invest.
• I stopped consuming alcohol.
  • I never was a big drinker, but overtime I found drinking more and more boring.
  • So I stopped altogether.

I thought lately:

• That analysing your feelings and thoughts (especially negative one) - have its’ own self worth - because, for example, you cannot be angry and analyse why at the same time. So irrespective of the outcome, you will be in a better state of mind.
• An interesting idea in the “the upside of irrationality” book - that humans are very good in adapting to changes, but greatly underestimate their ability to adapt. For some reason this idea help me to deal with procrastination. It makes it’s easier to start something - because I tell myself - “You underestimate your ability to adapt - just start it - you will be fine” :)
• If you want to change something, if you start to change that something, some changes will be bad. And then over time you will come with a better outcome, state.

Why? It can be useful to have a QR code for a URL, opportunities are endless. For example, you can print it on your business card, or use it for sharing information about a user group.

Generate QR code

brew install qrtool
qrtool encode "https://lysenko.dev" -t ansi-true-color # Generate QR code in terminal
qrtool encode "https://lysenko.dev" > qr.png # Generate QR code in PNG format

URL can be scanned by any mobile device with a camera - and it will open the URL in a browser.

References

• qrtool

Recently I read quite interesting 1.1.1.1 DNS outage post-mortem from Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-1111-incident-on-june-27-2024

It’s really fascinating to read about BGP security and at the same time quite concerning that some Tier-1 ISP still doesn’t have proper BGP security in place.

When I read technical details of the post-mortem - I also found out about Monocle tool that allow to investigate BGP routing (issues): https://github.com/bgpkit/monocle
Btw, Monocle is written in Rust :)

Get the joy of programming back

Worth reading - CUPID—for joyful coding: https://dannorth.net/cupid-for-joyful-coding/

Recently I found an interesting article about CUPID:

• C - Composable
• U - Unix Way
• P - Predictable
• I - Idiomatic
• D - Domain Based

And what’s most fascinating - it is how to make code easy and comfortable for fellow humans to understand.

Intro

This story started when I wanted to apply external terraform module to multiple AWS accounts.
Note: module, variable names and AWS account names are changed to protect innocents.

Review

Recently I read an interesting article:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-prioritize-iam-access-analyzer-findings/

Well, I don’t expect it to be interesting for most of people.

But for people that are in charge of security reviews of company AWS accounts and review AWS Access Analyser - it makes life much simpler.

Basically it shows a way to mute repeated false postitives. For example when you use SSO all new SSO users will be shown in AWS Access Analyser - that probably not a good thing. Especially if you have a lot of those.

Then you can just go to Archive rules - and auto archive SSO users :)

More details are in the article.

Review

Recently I read an interesting article on fake ransomware:

Fake ransomware gang targets U.S. orgs with empty data leak threats: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fake-ransomware-gang-targets-us-orgs-with-empty-data-leak-threats/

That was quite fascinating insight in social engineering in cyber crime world: that fake ransomware is quite widespread and popular.

Why work hard on hacking somebody servers if you can just claim that you stole the data and demand the ransom? :)

Surprisingly effective tactic. So to say - lean approach in the world of ransomware gangs.

Review

Recently I listened to an interesting TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/the_ted_interview_design_your_life_for_happiness_with_elizabeth_dunn

That was quite interesting insight in happiness causes. It seems that we are wired to be happy when we share, when we give, when we help each other.

Other insights:

• people that buy time with money are usually happier
• people who don’t use their smartphone during together meal are happier

One more brick to the happiness in life :)