Technology | On Things

I Passed the AWS Developer Exam

I passed the AWS Developer exam at the associates level today. I’m kind of surprised since I had to guess alot. I guess they were educated guesses. I was able to eliminate some of the answers based on my work experience with AWS. I think my company will reimburse me for the expense of the exam. I didn’t prep alot. I just wanted to take it to see where I stood and how much studying I would need to pass.

Creating an AWS Lambda App That Sends an SES Email Upon Successful Google Recaptcha in NodeJS v20

Node 16 was no longer going to be supported so I wanted to update my AWS Lambda app that validates Google Recaptcha via REST to the latest version (NodeJS v20). You may have to change some of the things around below, but it is working for me (proof is this websites Contact form; feel free to say Hello if this worked for you). I also posted the solution on StackOverflow:

I Passed My AWS Exam and What Helped Me the Most

Today, I passed the SAA-C03 Solutions Architect exam. It has changed a lot from SAA-C02. There is a new section on Data Lakes and more percentage of questions devoted to building secure applications. The first time I took the new C03 exam I failed, and I was very disappointed as I was expecting to pass since I already had an expired C02 credential. What helped me the most this time was the Coursera AWS Solutions Architect specialization, the AWS FAQs and hands-on experience. I’ve created a hand-selected list of links to the FAQs in my Github gist which is a...

Skin n' Bones CMS

Skin n’ Bones CMS is a hobby project of mine. I wasn’t satisfied with the journaling software currently available. Either the existing software wasn’t free or aesthetics of the journal wasn’t polished enough.

Using AWS Rekognition To Turn Images and PDFs Into Human Readable Text

I wanted to turn a PDF into text I could copy and paste so I turned to AWS Rekognition. The console only accepted files that were 5 MB. Mine was 13 MB so I had to use the console with asynchronous methods.

Installing Jekyll, OpenJDK 8 and S3 Website on a Mac

Update: This page is no longer updated. Some of the instructions may be incorrect. Proceed with caution.

North Penn Networks

2019 was a very good year thanks to two contracts that took place at the beginning and end of the year. Both were related to Drupal with some hints of AWS. I got to configure load balancers and also a large RDS MySQL instance. I signed non-disclosure agreements with my client's so I'm not able to mention their name though one of them was a large food service company based out of the midwest US and the other was for a travel sight that sees a lot of visitors. As I'm currently a student at the University of Illinois at...

Illinois Beginnings

UPDATE - January 3, 2020 Just got back my grade for the first semester and I completed the Cloud Networking course successfully with full credit (4 hours). My GPA is a 3.67. Looking forward to next semester's Cloud Computing Applications course. The semester starts January 21, 2020. There will be a final and mid-term. Good luck Parag! I recently got admitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their MCS (Master of Computer Science) program has strong data science requirements. I'm looking forward to the Cloud Computing courses offered as part of the degree requirements starting this Fall with Cloud...

Picostat Endings

I used to have a number of R Datasets available for download and visual inspection. They were cloned from the datasets found in R, and I created Slickgrid-enabled webpages out of the data for easy inspection. I also added support for dataset management and basic statistical operations. At one point there were 3,000 visitors to the site every month.