I should have scheduled this on the calendar; I forgot yesterday was Sunday.

Anyhow, back to our regular programming. I wrote down what I learned this week, so the quality should be better.

Something I learned

  • CloudFormation bizarre workaround:
    Without getting too worked up about how excruciating CloudFormation (CF) can be, I found a use case that "needs" a circular dependency this week. For those who lead a happy life, CF doesn't allow circular dependencies cause it needs to create AWS infrastructure in order. So, for the use case I'm about to outline, the folks at Amazon broke convention to make this workaround.

    One can configure Cognito (Auth service) to trigger Lambdas when certain events occur. For this to work, Cognito needs the Lambda to be created, and Cognito needs permission to access that Lambda, thus the issue. The IAM Policy needs both to be made, and both need the other to exist. What a headache. To solve this, AWS engineers said fuck it to the IAM policy route, and decided to define the Lambda access through their API Gateway offering??? This Lambda trigger shows nowhere on the UI today and is not how you configure any Lambda access. Amazing how I burned 3/4 of a day on this.
  • Cost of education VS. inflation:


    A side note before we continue: since I don't intend to publish this journal in a serious matter, it's literally about my weekly content diet and my thoughts on it; I want to play a game with the sources. I came across this info from a podcast published this week; it's not like I have any readers today, but let's see if anyone can guess the source.

    Back to the chart, my God, it's depressing; how is this okay, and what a waste of tax dollars money. I wasn't worried about me or my kids affording their education, but now I am. I never liked the anti-college narrative since my college education changed my life. Granted, I picked a CS degree, but now I get it. To reiterate my source, how is someone with a non-high-paying degree supposed to afford their education. Wages lagging behind inflation exacerbates this issue even further. The noble facade these institutions hide behind is completely gone for me. This isn't saying I won't push my kids towards getting a college degree; it's just that you really need to make sure the return is proportional to the investment.
  • Reverse engineering the government:
    While working, I listened to Lex Fridman's Matthew Cox interview; it's six hours long and a fantastic story. In it, Matt talked about how he managed to create fake people. He did this by calling the Social Security office a dozen plus times, each with a different scenario. He reverse-engineered their Social Security issuance process and found a loophole allowing him to create fake people. He did this in the early 2000s, so I wonder how different the system is today. You'd assume that some fraud detection system would flag this many calls from a single number or voice; it's not like you'd need to commit a crime to find out.

Gratefulness

So, I'm a citizen of Saudi Arabia, and as part of their laws, citizens need permission from the government to marry a non-Saudi. Without this permission, my kids or wife won't be able to get Saudi citizenship. The reasoning behind this isn't as clear, but the process is such a pain in the ass. It's been 7 months since I filled it, and nothing is moving along; the whole process is structured to discourage people. Since I live in the States, I have a friend helping me follow up, and I'm so grateful for him. He has been very responsive and determined to get it done. It's rare to find someone as willing to help others like this. I'm not naming him or sending him this for a while. That's not the goal of why I'm writing it; I'm truly grateful for him and everyone who has helped me in the process.