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I’ve been doing a lot of work recently for a non-profit organization to help my local community deal with private school tuition.
The main reason I became involved was due to a very specific requirement about the system.
A large number of the potential donors and participants did not want their private and personal financial information to be visible to the administrators and others.
We are not talking about actual PII or “sensitive” information. None of the information here could actually be used to steal or harm our userbase. This is just information like how much they may annually.
The basis of the program is that no family should have to pay more than 20% of their net income towards to tuition. They would pay 1% of their net income and be eligible to have the organization supplement what they pay.
The focus of this article is the design decisions I made and why I made them. For more information about this organization you may visit https://ahavaschinam.org
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Recently I had to design and implement a solution that used a third-party user management system for authentication.
I decided to use Amazon’s Cognito service, more specifically the User Pool aspect.
The third-party service was able to work with SAML, and so does Cognito.
Cognito’s output that you use is a JWT object.
The backend system is written using Java 8 and Spring Framework and Spring Security.
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I’ve been playing around with blockchain for non cryptocurrency.
The smart-contract design is very intriguing as a true means to defining business contracts.
I see a future where you have software engineers that specialize in building complex business contracts.
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I had been using WordPress for well over a decade. It is a great product and has a lot of capabilities.
It is also heavy, and complex if you really only need a simple blog. I generally write very technical content
that makes using something like markdown preferable over a WYSIWYG or even HTML. I had still been hosting my blog and my domain names on GoDaddy,
back when that was the preferable choice. Having had a great deal of experience over the past number of years with AWS, I decided to look for a solution
that would be easy and utilizing AWS.
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For large complex application system communication between services as well as from the external world is the backbone of your system infrastructure. I can go on for a while going into the various options for these types of systems and my many experiences with each of them. However, I want to focus on the managed services that AWS offers for this purpose. I’m going to run through SQS/SNS, Amazon MQ, and Kinesis. Each of these deserve their own in-depth analysis and all truly have great merit on their own.
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I’m not going to talk about politics, but I do want to talk about this article I found on one of my many feeds. I will summarize this extremely briefly. This guy was so baffled by the election outcome and the poor pollster statistics and generally how this wasn’t predicted with machine learning and the sort.