You are starting an SSM session yet using SSH keys? Can you explain that more?

SSM has StartSession which drops you into a shell, and StartSSHSession which is the equivalent of opening a tcp connection to an ssh server. When used as a ProxyCommand, the latter lets you do everything you'd normally so with an ssh connection, including tunneling. But you still need keys or some other auth mechanism.

I think the user you're replying to has trust issues.

"When I meet someone for the first time I don't trust them, there is so many scam artists that can tell colorful stories"

Sounds like they've been scammed before and are taking it out on candidates.

$156k in SF for a contractor is garbage pay. You have to pay for all your own expenses. Maybe you'd net $110k after all taxes and expenses.

There's real contractors and then there's fake contractors which should always be called staff augmentation.

No real senior software dev contractor would accept $75/hour in the Bay area. You're looking at minimum $100/hour.

Although, "fake contractors" or staff augmentation, those can be paid $75/hour or less.

It looks like median wages for a programmer in SF are around $55/hr according to the BLS. So if I was hiring, I'd assume median plus 1/3 for a contractor is plenty.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm

"because clearly, what makes a developer great is grinding leetcode for 3 months and then pretending you haven't seen the problems before during the interview."

This is my biggest gripe with today's technical interviewing. They act like leetcode is real world engineering.

This is a genius idea, I love it. Good job. Great work.

How was your TripleByte experience?

Netherlands hasn't had increased unemployment due to COVID?

No we don't have a full lockdown. Many work from home, some in A/B teams and if your business had to close (cafés, restaurants without delivery, pilot) you still get paid except your company can get it reimbursed via the government.

So basically our economy kinda just runs on, even though a lot less is happening.

Restaurants have switched to delivery if they can. Most people I know actually have more money now, since you can't really go out and spend it. And May is usually the month where Dutch people get their 13th month (bonus).

Our economy is in the toilet. Large parts of it at least (that aren't very visible).

We'll see the wave of defaults and bankruptcies in a couple of months.

Define "our".

The economy of the country The Netherlands

Thanks it was a bit ambiguous. I hope your economy improves soon :)

The statistics seem to say otherwise - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/16/fewer-employed-in-marc...

That report says there was a drop of 0.2% in labor participation in March. That's not a lot.

Not yet. A combination of work-from-home, a fairly limited lockdown and a variety of state and city schemes for income support for entrepreneurs, small business and a furlough program seem to have limited the impact for now. We’ll see in 5-6 months I guess.

What's your AWS environment look like? You can find me @ https://linkedin.com/in/MoBattah

I added you to discuss, based in Europe so offline for 7h now

Amazon Web Services. Won't cost much.

If you want to keep it simple..

A very small EC2 box. Maybe even micro instance. That'll run your python code + sqlite.

If you want, you can use an elastic load balancer or Route53. If you don't have DNS already. Route53 is AWS's DNS service which is easy to use.

This whole setup should not cost you much. If you do it right, you can probably spend less than $10/month taking advantage of the free tier.

Later on, as a side project, you can try to make the app serverless. You're probably close to it being serverless. Doing this allows you to run it on AWS Lambda. Which makes things even cheaper, if not free. And it's just pretty cool.

But most likely you'd have to switch to a real data store. No problem since AWS has DynamoDB.

Absolutely nope. Both unfamiliar naming and the console interface is overwhelming, it's overkill to learn it just to run one VPS.