Software Engineering Week 4 - Don't get hacked and do your homework

Week's notes

This week was pretty good. It feels like it is a bit slow for me to absorb the information but I enjoy the current course material. I am trying to learn a lot of new things in different areas at once so that can make my learning velocity feel like it isn't good enough. This week settled some problems for me by focusing on being device independent so I can do my work anywhere. I can have a different device for software development, design and documentation, and use other devices for course assignments like this. 

 As far as learning for this week, after trying out a few different programs for making UML diagrams my favorite is a google docs plugin called draw.io diagrams. The important thing for me is that I can access my files from any computer running windows, Linux, or chrome OS. That way I can spend more time on my course work. When things are locked to a single platform or require software installed on every device then that puts a wrench in things for me. 

Aside from process improvement there was some good reading this week comparing hacks of Sony and Target. The important thing for me from these articles is that inside the designer facade of a companies brand there are just people working at their computers. Every company isn't filled with super hackers designing their systems. Sometimes people just want to buy some software from Microsoft and get things up and running. Then they end up getting their systems broken into and lots of account information leaked. 

I don't fall into the category of people who say this is inevitable. If somebody is really motivated they can hack any system right? If the system is well designed then it gets harder though. Exploiting software and protecting against unwanted software use it isn't an area I know much about though. The important thing for me to keep in mind is what I don't know with regard to security.  By doing that I can work to avoid setting up critical systems without consulting experts. Also by utilizing known libraries when possible instead of getting creative with security schemes I think I can help to avoid introducing new opportunities hackers. 

Upcoming work

The exciting part for this week is ramping up our group project. Thanks to the selection of the Agile process for this project we can really make something fun. By having the project open ended and with a short weekly cycle of design/develop/deploy we can make something interesting without stressing out too much.