A few years back, I worked at a startup that got a contract with a major software company. Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS database

A few years back, I worked at a startup that got a contract with a major software company. Our job was to implement a crypto storage system for an OSS database where each user only had access to data based on their own authentication keys. Only minimal changes to the DB allowed, so we made our own PAM module to handle the authentication and key management. We implemented a POSIX layer that intercepted file ops and backing-stored and encrypted the blocks into S3 containers. Files/blocks that got purged would automatically pull from S3. One month into the project the major software company decided they didn’t want it. But we still had the contract and had to fulfill it for six more months. So yeah, six months of code in the trash. But I learned a lot of S3, AWS and wrote a toy compiler with the spare time. Since nobody cared I was able to try a lot of new solutions, test out different languages and tools. Basically experimented with everything out there. Delivered my code on the day of the deadline. Tested, worked, archived.