Common sense when looking for talent — In the last few weeks I’ve briefly explored the market as a candidate with disappointing results on the experience (and it is not even the first time). So a rant follows, but with a focus on the lessons that companies can learn. What do you want? This is probably the more important bit. I…

After a tough process of importing and editing, I’ve moved all my posts both here and in Blogspot to a new address in https://gonzalo.f-v.es.

The Windows Vista of Apple — Yes. I feel your pain. That little bar at the bottom of your screen is no longer visible after you upgraded to macOS Catalina. Well, here I am, to help you before Apple does. Open a terminal. How? — you may ask — my dock doesn’t exist. …

Avoiding detection of the use of compromised credentials — A few weeks ago there was an attack on Capital One’s AWS infrastructure that lead to the compromise of personal information on around 100M people. When I read the initial reports, I thought the root cause was the usual “S3 bucket with public permissions” (S3 is a distributed object storage…

Least privilege vs complexity explosion — I’ve been doing some research on credentials compromise and abuse in AWS. In the process, it was obvious that the main mitigation would be (is) to minimise the permissions assigned to the EC2 instance profile, applying the “least privilege principle”. However, sometimes assigning permissions is tricky and it is not…

Us vs them — These days I’m reading a fascinating book on Roman History called SPQR. And I’ve discovered Roman History is full of lessons for today’s world. As a small token, a line from Plautus, a Roman writer, that appeared in some of his books. Demophilus wrote this, Plautus barbarised it. As Mary…

Migrating to cloud Bitbucket — UPDATE: A few days after publication, the documentation now includes some examples. Well done, Atlassian. Most people in the software industry know Jira. For better or for worse, it’s the most used product for managing tickets, requests, bugs… The company behind that product, Atlassian, has other products. One of them…

A bunch of ideas while commuting — For many people not living in the UK, it will come as a surprise that the railway system in London is quite expensive and provides a really bad service. Some of my Spanish readers will think “surely that cannot be true”. After all, railway was born in the UK. …

Disappointment with the book 1776 — I enjoy buying books. I enjoy starting them. Honestly, finishing books is more difficult for me. But I’ve been trying to improve on that. I was very excited when I bought ‘1776' by David McCullough. The title is a reference to the year when American Independence was proclaimed. However the…