Yes, I’m Interested!
23 Jan 2025
The Spark
My interest in software engineering stems from my high school days when I used to use sneaker bots to purchase limited sneakers. I was always amazed by the bots on how well they performed and adapted to different types of websites. I was so hooked on bots that even without any experience or knowledge with programming, I tried to learn Go so I could create my own bot. My sneaker bot never came to life, but my experience with sneaker botting introduced me to programming and software development.
Creating Websites
Web development has been one of my top interests in software engineering. I always dreamed of creating a retail website like Amazon. Out of all the fields in software engineering, I have the most knowledge with web development due to participating in free online courses like The Odin Project. Although I have not yet finished the whole course, it taught me the basics of HTML, CSS, and Java Script. It also pointed out what I need to learn for the future. This includes learning databases like MySQL to store and manage data with. I also need to learn React to create pretty user interfaces. A skill I want to learn soon is cloud computing. I’ve had experience with using cloud from Amazon Web Services and Google cloud, but I have no experience with cloud computing. Since the majority of websites nowadays are run through the cloud, I think this would be a good skill for me to have in the future.
Securing Applications
An area that I’ve lately gotten interested in is cybersecurity. I am fascinated by how systems can be secured against threats and how vulnerabilities are found by attackers. I’ve had my first experience with implementing security measures in a project for ICS 311. On the last homework we had to create a simple secured texting program. For this homework I learned about encryption and private keys which I had to implement to tackle security. This sparked my interest in cybersecurity and also had me wondering how secure are individuals when using the web. Currently. I’ve been watching a lot more hacking videos to learn more about hacking and prevention. I’ve never tried hacking and that is a skill I want to learn in the near future. A goal I set for myself is to visit a hackathon this semester to have a first hand experience and witness hackers hack. I also want to see how to create solutions for the bugs that they exploit.
Next Up, Working with Data
Another interest that I have yet to experience is data science and analytics. I’ve always loved working with statistics and raw data, which I would say is my favorite aspect in math. Unfortunately, I have not taken any classes that combine software engineering and data. I hope to gain more knowledge in data science and what the work atmosphere is like. I want to learn what they actually do and where the data go after analysis and what they are used for.
