Week 7

 Week 7 at Strastan

This week was a full-on backend workout no WFH distractions, just focused days in the campus lab filled with debugging, deploying, and finally watching things click into place.

Thoughts

It’s wild how much goes into making a system feel “secure.” Swapping hardcoded LinkedIn credentials for Secrets Manager wasn’t just a cleanup it was a mindset shift. Suddenly, every token, every permission, every authorizer felt like part of a bigger trust chain. And once we saw the OpenID flow working end-to-end, it felt like unlocking a new level of backend maturity.

The Content Calendar orchestration was another eye-opener. Building the LinkedIn Publisher Lambda to consume SQS messages and trigger updates across DynamoDB and EventBridge made me realize how powerful and fragile event-driven systems can be. One misnamed field or missing IAM permission, and the whole flow breaks. But when it works? It’s magic.

Challenges

  • Migrating the repo broke more things than expected CDK constructs, IAM roles, even Lambda mappings needed manual fixes.
  • Debugging token validation and authorizer behavior took hours of CloudWatch log diving.
  • SQS message handling exposed schema mismatches that weren’t obvious until we mocked real data.
  • EventBridge triggers required multiple redeploys just to get the timing and filters right.

 Realizations

  • Security isn’t just about encryption it’s about intentional architecture.
  • Secrets Manager is a lifesaver, and hardcoding anything is a future headache.
  • Event-driven design forces you to think in flows, not just functions.
  • Postman, CloudWatch, and a good playlist are essential survival tools.

Final Thoughts

Week 7 was messy, satisfying, and full of “finally!” moments. We’re not just building endpoints anymore   we’re building systems that talk, react, and scale. And that feels pretty awesome.
And as this marks our last week of OJT, it’s surreal to look back at how much we’ve grown  from writing basic routes to orchestrating full-blown AWS architectures. It's been a challenging ride, but one filled with learning, breakthroughs, and a deeper respect for the systems behind the scenes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3

Week 3 at Strastan This week was all about locking down our backend authentication, authorization, and event orchestration took center stage. We worked from the school’s computer lab since our usual rooms were reserved for graduation prep, but that didn’t slow us down. We finalized the Cognito User Pool setup and wired in Lambda functions for sign-up and user retrieval. The authorizer was integrated to guard protected routes, and CDK deployments finally hit zero remaining tasks. From there, we refined the registration flow to encrypt user profiles post-confirmation and validated everything through Postman. Midweek, we shifted focus to IAM roles and EventBridge. Each Lambda was scoped with least-privilege permissions, and we spun up a custom event bus with filtering rules to ensure only trusted events were processed. CORS policies were enforced, and API Gateway endpoints were hardened to reject unauthorized requests. By Friday, we had a fully secured backend: tokens were validated, ...
Read more

Week 5

 Week 5 at Strastan This week was all about chasing down bugs, securing credentials, and finally watching our LinkedIn OAuth2 flow behave like it was supposed to. Between graduation prep buzz and lab sessions, I managed to wrestle the last pieces of the integration into place.  Thoughts OAuth2 sounds simple until you’re knee-deep in token exchanges, redirect URLs, and CSRF protection. Getting /linkedin/auth to return a clean 302 felt like a small victory especially after hours of decoding CloudWatch logs and patching handler logic. Once the callback started accepting both GET and POST, parsing the authorization code, and saving tokens to DynamoDB, it finally felt like the system was breathing on its own. Adding the state parameter was a turning point. Encoding the Cognito ID and nonce, storing it with a TTL, and validating it on callback made the whole flow feel airtight. And pulling user profile data from LinkedIn’s /v2/userinfo endpoint? That was the cherry on top. Ch...
Read more