What's your biggest failure?

Typical interview question. Well, my failure once led me to fear that I'd be banned from EU&US, living a "thug life". Well, I was 21, and I had this feeling for a few moments, but nonetheless. You may wonder how I got there.

So being a Junior C++ Dev, I've been taking a look at the #AWS. I guess it was 2012, and since I was new to programming, it was all very interesting. At some point, I noticed that AWS didn't have C++ (at that point), and a great idea came to my mind - what if I write a C++ SDK, become a maintainer, and maybe Amazon notices, and I become famous and all the stuff?

I'm a get-things-done person, so the same evening I had a prototype with working authentication. Well, I was happy and went to the gym.

My English back then was pretty mediocre, and when I got a phone call, where some person with an accent was talking something about "security", I thought that this is some HR reaching out since I'd been working in the Samsung security department back then. Well, no big deal.

The next morning was sunny, I slept pretty well, and I was full of enthusiasm and excitement to continue my pet project. That was before I grabbed my phone and saw "Unsuccessful transaction: failed to charge 3000$. Your AWS". To say that I broke in a cold sweat is an understatement, luckily I had only 1k on my account, so that payment attempt did not succeed, Well, 1k was my monthly salary at that time, so apparently, I was scared. I instantly opened my laptop and tried to remove the card from my account. AWS did not allow that since... I have debt. I decided to block the credit card.

Well, at least now I felt safe for my money... but what happened?

I pushed my "pet project" to Github, alongside credential tokens I used for authentication. Somebody used them to deploy everything that is possible on AWS to mine some crypto or whatever reason, I honestly don't know. I spent some time removing all the EC2 instances deployed in different regions, I looked at the debt and... it was 8k already! My heart was beating as hell, I definitely wasn't ready to pay that much, and that was exactly the moment when I thought that "living a shadow life", hiding from the police - is my future.

The good thing is that AWS has support, and It turned out that I was not the only one in a similar situation. After a few days, the debt was gone, and I felt like never messing with AWS ever again.

Well, after winning a hackathon in 2021 my team and I have 10k credit on Amazon, so I kinda could've paid off anyway... But it's a good thing that debt in the past and we moved on to healthy relationships :)

#failure #firstproject #aws