Hello world!

Hello, my name is Sharon and I’m a Computer Science student in my last year at Oregon State University. In my free time, I read, rock climb, and go down Wikipedia rabbit holes. (Did you know Wikipedia has a home page?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

I work as a Systems Engineer the Open Source Lab on campus, a lab that services the open source community. My job consists configuring and patching of a lot of Linux environments, and rolling out environments with Chef.

I started programming as a kid, because I was into Minecraft and wanted to make my own plugins for it. I started by learning Java, and from there it really interested me. From there, I learned JavaScript and Python, and got fascinated by networking. I have a few passion projects using Node.js and express.js or socket.io. Programming something that involves computers communicating with eachother is my greatest interest.

I’m taking a senior capstone class, and I can select a project that I work on. I’m looking at finding a project where I can work on a server, preferably with node.js or Python. I also have a strong background in security because I used to work as a Security Engineer at a small company in San Fransisco. I see that in the senior project selection, there’s one called Website Security Research Project, which looks interesting. Here are its requirements:

1. Perform penetration testing on the infrastructure of the web app for many of the top ten attacks (linked below)
2. Learn from each attempt at pentesting, and harden the web app accordingly.
3. Create a writeup for the attack and the solution and add to the GitHub repo how-to.
4. Repeat 1-3 until done 

This project seems interesting because it involves server-side programming, adjusting the web app to be more secure, and I’d also get the chance to pentest the web server.