I recently launched a new web app called PriceAlert, which is a service that provides price tracking and price history charts for some of the most popular e-commerce stores operating in Greece.
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One of my projects is running on a Digital Ocean VPS, deployed there using Laravel Forge (an amazing tool which automates a lot of painful server-related tasks). Although I have enabled the backup service offered by Digital Ocean, I needed to create an additional off-site backup solution for the project’s database, so I decided to store them in AWS S3 service. This small tutorial covers the task of creating a shell script that will automatically backup a MySQL database to a set of AWS S3 buckets.
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I recently had a case in a B2B project I was working on where we wanted to allow users to upload their company logo, but resize them automatically to specific dimensions, while keeping the aspect ratio of the logo intact (and without cropping any part of it). Here’s how I tackled the issue.
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Although many years have passed since then, I’m pretty sure it was 2003 when I read Kevin Mitnick’s book The Art of Deception. In it, he describes several real and hypothetical “hacking” cases, illustrating that humans are the weakest link in any secure system, thus a very good target for such attacks. The whole concept is called social engineering.
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A couple of months ago, I went to a Currys/PC World store (for those of you who are unfamiliar with the brand, it is a British electrical retailer) to pick up a vacuum cleaner I reserved online (I needed it quickly, therefore I didn’t want to wait for home delivery).
The quite spacious store was almost empty of customers and a lot of sales people were wandering around doing nothing. Before going to pick up my order, I decided to have a quick look at some laptops they had on display.
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