The past week I’ve been busy traveling, but I also decided I’d try to play around with AWS. I signed up for a free account and followed some basic tutorials to figure out how to get things started (this one was mostly good for me). I ended up going with Lightsail on AWS because it “seemed” to be the most beginner friendly. At this point, I’ve managed to get this instance of WordPress hosted on AWS, but only have front-facing HTTP access. I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to get HTTPS access (hence the title!), but it’s been a bit of a struggle. There’s a ton of slightly different information out there because of varying project setup needs (it doesn’t help that Lightsail + related software are changing constantly either!).

In other news, I took the plunge yesterday and (re)started a premium subscription to leetcode so I could start tackling problems in python. For some background, when I was prepping for interviews a year and a half ago, I was using java as my interview language. I’ve heard that experienced programmers don’t like how verbose it is, but I appreciate its type safety and how explicit it is, as a beginner. I have a feeling that python will feel more elegant in the long run (no semicolons!?), but in my first few problems on leetcode, I’ve found myself scratching my head trying to figure out how to translate things from java to python. 七転び八起き.