Background Recently, I along with fellow guest Jeevan Singh was invited by Jacob Garrison to be featured on the Champions of Security Podcast by Bionic. Jacob, Jeevan, and I spoke to our audience on various topics such as: How to make IT / Software security sexy Celebrating security wins company-wide Collaborating with product engineering for stakeholder support Offering the carrot before resorting to the stick

Background Recently, I had the wonderful opportunity to be invited by fellow software engineer, Kevin Miller on his Coder Conversations Podcast! Kevin and I spoke to our audience on various topics such as: My beginnings in the software industry Career ladder The Perks & Quirks of tech leadership Growing your peers and your team Interviews … and more! Tune in to my featured episode here, and check out the links below to see what other cool things Kevin is up to! 🙂

Background In Redshift, there are 2 primary methods for loading data into a Redshift table: INSERT and COPY commands. One might ask, what’s the difference? When is it best to use which one? INSERT Command Per the official AWS docs, INSERT is a SQL command used to, well, insert data row-by-row into a…

Background As of March 2021, I shifted my career domain from full-stack web development into the data track. Fast-forward to now, the three main data storage services I’ve used most heavily include Redshift, RDS, and DynamoDB. In the beginning, although I was quite sure how each of them was unique in…

Use Case Requirements You have an occasional need to copy and / or unload data from an S3 bucket from one account to a Redshift cluster in another account. This can be achieved through Redshift’s COPY & UNLOAD commands in combination with IAM Roles and Role chaining. Background IAM Role chaining also works…

Background IAM Role chaining is a method of granting temporary access to AWS resources by assuming multiple IAM roles in a sequence. This approach is useful when you have a scenario where one role needs to assume another role to access certain resources or perform specific actions. Typically cross-account. In this…

Use Case / Requirements You have been tasked with joining / integrating cross-domain data across more than two separate data stores (i.e. Redshift and S3) stored across multiple AWS accounts for deriving custom analytics for business reporting. This can be achieved by implementing the Data Mesh concept. Background The Data Mesh concept aims to…

Problem statement I was recently dealing with a problem where my API was taking a long time fetching credentials from Vault to connect to Amazon RDS. Vault is a pretty popular tool for managing secrets such as API keys, passwords, and security tokens. It is commonly…

Background I have spent a great chunk of my career building customer-facing applications. This would frequently involve building UIs in Angular, Ember, and backend APIs in Java+Spring, Express. And then deploying them to various environments/prod using CI/CD pipelines (mostly GitLab CI and Jenkins). More recently (circa 2021), I switched my domain…