- Discuss your biggest success during the course. What was your breakthrough, and why did it matter? What did you learn, about the technology, and also about yourself?
I think my biggest success during this course is overall how much I have learned about web app security. Attacking a website we created and then figuring out how to mitigate these attacks has shown me how little I know about web app security and how much more I need to learn. I don’t think I had one major breakthrough but more along the lines of little breakthroughs throughout the week. I would get stuck on something for a few hours, and then figure out what the issue was. I believe this matters because it helped instill confidence in myself as a programmer, that I was able to break through any barrier that I ran into. I didn’t overcome the barriers all by myself but I know with a little bit of help I can overcome future barriers.
Like I said above, I have learned a ton about the technologies we worked with. I had never coded in PHP before so everything was new. I learned how to create a simple CRUD web app with it but more importantly, I learned about all the security features PHP offers to make web app more secure. About myself, I did learn that I can let myself get flustered rather easily. During this project, I ran into issues that at first seemed to be “app breaking”, like we were going to have to start our project over. Turns out the issues were not that big of a deal but I noticed I often immediately jump to that conclusion without doing good research. I realized I needed to learn to stop, breathe and then look into problems before going all doomsday.
- Conduct a SWOT analysis of this course. SWOT means: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities (to make this course better), and Threats (what are any serious issues that could affect the quality of this course). Discuss each.
Strength: The freedom to create something on how we see fit. I feel like the guidelines on the project were perfect. They provided us with just enough info on what the project needed but didn’t have a giant list of requirements on what was needed. I felt like it gave us room for creativity and not too much hand-holding. I also think having partners on the projects was a strength as that is most likely how we will program in the real world. We will not be working on a project by ourselves most of the time so it was good practice.
Weakness: I think quick feedback was a weakness. We were a little nervous to proceed with portions of our assignment since we hadn’t had TA feedback yet but luckily we were on track with our project.
Opportunities: I think this course could be better with more security-type projects. Cybersecurity seems to be a hot field currently but if I remember right there was only one option for a Cybersecurity type project. It would be nice to have more options even though I think it might be hard to come up with those types of projects.
Threats: I think the only threat to the course is what I said in the weakness section is the quick feedback. I would feel bad for any student who continued to work on their project while waiting for feedback but then had to go back and undo most of the work they did based on the feedback they received.
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