Guilherme Ferreira
I was thinking about writing an article with few important points about this year but, I have so many good things and experiences to share that I decided to go straight with memories as soon as they come to my mind!
So the first one is an awesome book about cybersecurity and privacy:
I do have to admit that before reading this book I was one of those persons that says: – I have nothing to hide online, why should I care that much about privacy? (Hint: Kevin Mitnick describe exactly the same way of thinking in the book…).
The book is so well written that you don’t even realize that is getting close to the end. But what you DO REALIZE is how important data security IS!
Just to point a few scenarios, I bet that you are pretty confident that your password for whatever online account that you hold now is quite secure. You would be surprised knowing how easy is to crack our supers3cur3p4sswords!
My recommendation, learned from the book, is to use a password manager, that acts as a central point to store all your passwords for different accounts and, it gives you good advises about how weak is your current passwords, how many platforms uses the same password and it let you generate really STRONG PASSWORDS, something like mK&Sz3b9Sx@*9ZM#B5lBIXQ2kSas1SOhY!
Another necessary step is to secure the data that are you sending over the web. Talking in a raw way, that is basically what an HTTPS protocol does. It ensures that all the communication between your browser and the website that you access gets encrypted. To ensure it when you are surfing on the web, a good call would be installing a browser extension for HTTPS everywhere! As the link already says, it “forces” all navigation over HTTPS and accessing the previous link you will get a better understand how it works.
Getting a break from IT, I would like to remind everyone that this year we had the most famous sports event on this planet… Yes! I am talking about the FIFA World Cup 2018!
Unfortunately my national team didn’t get the trophy this time, but nevertheless, the event was spectacular! I had the chance to visit two wonderful cities in Russia and watch two live games.
Some good memories are shared below:
A part of football, this year was particularly interesting for my nation because of our presidential election. I would say that was not a big surprise that Jair Messias Bolsonaro got in the power, especially because most of the other candidates were either not reliable or totally unknown to the common public. For me, the surprise was how everyone let this man leads the nation, even though we have many proofs of his outrageous speeches against the minorities.
While I had a vacation at my homeland this year, I took the chance to have a few books about our history. One, in particular, got my attention (I didn’t find – yet – an English version for it).
It’s called O Povo Brasileiro (The Brazilian People)
This book describes how the nation was built by the mix and influence of our natives, slavery and the Portuguese colony.
All that political discussion deserves a few other separate topics, so by now, I will jump back to another exciting thing that I have learned close to the end of the year.
I am talking about the Go Programming Language!
Since the beginning of December 2018, I have been busy taking online classes on Udemy about Go Programming Language. I felt that was time for me to learn a new programming language and while searching for options, Go definitely got my attention because of the different paradigm in the language related to Types, as I have learned, Go is all about T-Y-P-E-S! (Thanks Todd McLeod)
I totally recommend Todd McLeod course about Go Programming Language! His classes are totally easy-going and I never had felt so relaxed while learning something related to coding.
I still have many other points that I could share in this article but like you guys, I still have to go out to celebrate the New Year’s Eve!
Happy New Year !!!
