It reminds me of the PowerPoint my company had.

It was this graph showing how many tech people they have since 1960, and the numbers kept multiplying.

How they rated tech people was someone who works behind the computer. So yeah, as we gain more employees, we tend to put them behind computers to do work?

I’m pretty sure they assumed if you bought their service, you have the competency to properly set it up.

And I proved them wrong.

Ah not to discount devops, I mean that in a good way.

Devops made me lazy in that for the past decade, I focus on just everything inside the code base.

I literally push code into a magic black box that then triggers a rube goldberg of events. Servers get instanced. Configs just get magically set up. It’s beautiful. Just years of smart people who make it so easy that I never have to think about it.

Since I can’t pay my devops team to come to my house, I get to figure it all out!

I shared it because, out there, there is a junior engineer experiencing severe imposter syndrome. And here I am, someone who has successfully delivered applications with millions of users and advanced to leadership roles within the tech industry, who overlook basic security principles.

We all make mistakes!

Haha I’m pretty sure my little server was just part of the “let’s test our dumb script to see if it works. Oh wow it did what a moron!”

Lessons learned.

The latter. It was autogenerated by the VPS hosting service and I didn’t think about it.

You’re not wrong! Devops made me lazy

Now that you mentioned it, it didn’t! I recall even docker Linux setups would yell at me.

I published it to the internet and the next day, I couldn’t ssh into the server anymore with my user account and something was off.

Tried root + password, also failed.

Immediately facepalmed because the password was the generic 8 characters and there was no fail2ban to stop guessing.