Trials in Snake Charming

So I had my first technical interview today!  I had to share a text editor during a webex and write python code.  The first problem was to find the first instance of string “x” inside of string “y” and return it’s index location.  I had one small error that would have become obvious when I went to run it, but other than that I nailed it.

The second was a good bit tougher.  I had to take a given integer and determine it’s value as an index in the Fibonacci sequence.  Again, I did pretty well aside from a couple small errors that were easy to adjust.  Gil if you are reading thank you for the interview!  I really enjoyed talking with you and I appreciated the advice you gave me to tighten up my code.

It’s been a great week for me readers! Amazon Web Services applied credit to my account and cancelled out all fraudulent charges. On top of that, my resume and GitHub went live on all major job boards on Sunday and I’ve been drowning in attention from recruiters and hiring managers ever since. I’ll keep you all posted as I move through the interview process and will eventually ad a new section called “Ready to look for a job?” that will give helpful tips and cautionary tales from my experience hunting for my employed dev position. Hard work really does pay off!

What getting chased by recruiters this week feels like.

So far so good with AWS support.  They have begun the conciliation process and my account should get credited sometime in the next seven business days.  They said my account was most likely used to mine bitcoins.  It’s a jungle out there!

Soooo, my AWS account got hacked today. AWS is short for Amazon Webservices and it is basically a platform for you to host all kinds of web service instances through Amazon’s vast server network. Apparently even though I had two form verification active on my account someone hacked it and ran about 160 high volume instances on my account. It had been going on for 12 hours by the time AWS securtiy caught it. Luckily they were watching because even in that short amount of time they racked up over 2,000 dollars in fees on my account. I wiped all my keys and passwords and am working with amazon to resolve the charges. It sounds like everything will be ok but I’ll feel better when I hear the final verdict from Amazon Customer Service.

I successfully deployed Funnypages using Heroku today! You can try the app at http://funnypages.herokuapp.com/funnypages/. As of right now it only has 3 comics. My final task is to have Heroku run my management commands every 30 seconds so that the comics stay up to date. It’s been such a long road getting here I’m not sure what to say. Thank you to all of my friends that supported and encouraged me, and thank you to my mentors, Eric and Brian Carr, for giving me the extra push I needed at times to get to the next level. Now to get a job!

A lot of progress this week! I learned to use BeautifulSoup in place of lxml. It ended up doing a lot of the same stuff in a different way, but the big difference is that it eats html encoding issues for breakfast. Once I was able to reliably target the urls of new webcomic images, I created two new methods in my ComicSeries class. One finds the url for the updated image, and the other checks to see if I already have it and then downloads it and makes a new ComicImg object if I don’t.

I also created a comic scraper management command that runs the image download method for every comic series. Now I just need to hook it up to a cron job and run it every 30 seconds and my project is finished! I will be spending the next couple days working with my mentor to learn to use cron and put FunnyPages into production. I can see the finish line! Well, for my project anyway. The next big adventure will be putting together my resume and trying to get a job interview.