The year was 2015, and I had just quit my first job out of college after less than a year. Not exactly the roaring start to my adult life I had hoped for.
I was pretty broke. But I had prospects—May of that year I got a job at @azavea and things were looking up!pic.twitter.com/69NUzFElSJ
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Just one problem: I couldn’t renew my car registration because it failed inspection (the brakes were shot). I needed to pay $300+ bucks to get the brakes replaced, but I didn’t have the cash. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal. But there was a catch...pic.twitter.com/ULCLiVUFB3
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I was also getting ticketed $35 every other day by the same PPA person who would methodically track my car down and ticket me. My burn rate was ~$525/month in tickets alone and I had no cash to pay them, let alone fix the brakes. Pay day was still a few weeks away.pic.twitter.com/8r6VD0GucE
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This vicious cycle of being broke, getting tickets and not being able to afford to fix it was causing me a fair bit of anxiety. So as the bills piled up, I started researching to see if I could hide my car...in plain sight. Somewhere it wouldn’t get ticketed.pic.twitter.com/tpdCYxKun3
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I found my golden ticket—an open dataset of every parking ticket ever handed out in Philly going back years. It had millions of entries. I figured if I could plot them on a map, I could find blank spots where I could park my car but not incur tickets! https://www.opendataphilly.org/dataset/parking-violations …pic.twitter.com/9oSaIiaAIA
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Best part was—my new job was at a geospatial analysis company. This was my side project to get up to speed on why our work was valuable. One issue—I couldn’t open a 6 million row .csv on my laptop because it crashed my desktop GIS software. I needed more juice.pic.twitter.com/TOawzSfTf7
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At my new job, I sat next to this quiet engineer
@hectcastro whose desk seemed like air traffic control. Once an hour some other engineer would stop by to ask for help. I was like, “who is this guy?” Turns out he led the ops team. Still does. Now he’s VP of Engineering. Props.pic.twitter.com/Edj2owvDOxPrikaži ovu nit -
I realized pretty quickly that whatever Hector was up to was EXTREMELY valuable—all these brilliant engineers went to HIM for help. I decided I wanted to learn how to do what Hector did, and then it dawned on me: maybe I can use AWS to open this massive .csv...pic.twitter.com/FzmTsRtkCS
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Now I’m talking about 1. Solving my problem 2. Learning about my new field and 3. Gaining valuable skills. This...this was a good idea. I created an AWS account that very night and logged in. First thing I did—make sure there was a free tier. There was!pic.twitter.com/54CuS6TfEB
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I clicked a few buttons, tried to upload the .csv, and quickly realized I was WAY out of my depth. I was never gonna be an ops engineer...and that was the end of that. Or so I thought...pic.twitter.com/jEfA5RjuaJ
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A few months later, on a Sunday while walking around Philly with my girlfriend (now wife!), I got an alert on my phone. My bank account was overdrawn. Like, by a couple thousand bucks.pic.twitter.com/KLUh7gN56X
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How?! I had paid for the new brakes, passed inspection, and stopped the bleeding. I still had a mountain of tickets to pay off but I was making progress...what happened? I logged into my bank account and then I saw it...a HUGE AWS withdrawal.pic.twitter.com/vucnqwfjve
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I furiously logged into AWS to figure out what had happened. Somehow I had reserved an enormous EC2 instance and it had been running 24/7 for months on end, wracking up a huge bill. I was stunned. Stupefied. Gobsmacked. I’d really done it now.pic.twitter.com/hcRsq3LRas
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So, I did the only think I could think of and I called the support line. It was a Sunday, so I was on hold for an agonizingly long time. Eventually I got someone and told them straight up—I’m an idiot and incurred a few thousand dollars in charges trying to open a .csv...pic.twitter.com/EOnExrA5XO
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They were super nice but made it clear—this was something they needed to run up the chain. They didn’t really sound optimistic; honestly they sounded a bit afraid. I think we both felt bad for each other.pic.twitter.com/m1rfhTBaAB
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The next day, I got a call. It was from a supervisor. He told me he had news—they had decided to refund all of the charges.pic.twitter.com/yGaPlZfplG
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Just one condition: I needed to promise never to open an AWS account ever again. I said, “...deal.”pic.twitter.com/7wSKjfixoz
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