Notes on "Navigating Corporate Giants: Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell"

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July 23, 2024

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Notes on "Why Swift's type checker is so slow"

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July 18, 2024

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My notes on "Things you wish you didn't need to know about S3"

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July 16, 2024

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Notes on "DynamoDB now supports cross-account access. But is that a good idea?"

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July 15, 2024

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My notes on "The Trough of Despair"

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July 11, 2024

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Notes on "Subdomain Takeover: Ignore This Vulnerability at Your Peril"

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July 8, 2024

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My notes on "The security concerns of a JavaScript sandbox with the Node.js VM module"

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July 5, 2024

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My notes on "Visual Studio Code extensions are much less secure than browser extensions or even npm packages"

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July 3, 2024

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AWS

AppSync

[Article] The slow evolution of AppSync RDS support

When I started working with AppSync at the fall of 2021 it already supported all important data sources: reading and writing data in DynamoDB tables, calling Lambda functions, sending generic HTTP requests, and also working with relational databases. While the syntax was a bit awkward back then due to the choice of VTL for resolvers, the integration itself was solid.

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Tamás Sallai

June 25, 2024

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AWS

Cognito

[Article] How Cognito User Pools work

Cognito User Pools is a user directory where the users of an application can authenticate before they can access protected resources. In practice, that means Cognito stores the users, issues tokens on login, and then the backend when it receives a request reads who the user is. No more hashing passwords or implementing MFA.

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Tamás Sallai

June 11, 2024

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Books

Courses

[Article] Introducing: subscriptions to books and courses

I'm changing my offerings from one-time per-book payments to a subscription that includes all my content that I'm selling directly. This is the next step on my journey to make a living out of teaching. And in this post I'm describing the thinking behind this change.

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Tamás Sallai

June 8, 2024

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Webdev

[Article] Hardcoded assumptions

What I found is when a piece of software is "brittle" that is the result of hardcoded assumptions that are not guaranteed by the other parts of the system. In a sense, a part becomes "overfitted" to the environment so that when the environment changes even in ways that are considered safe, it still breaks.

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Tamás Sallai

May 28, 2024

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