Cyber Security: An Offensive Mindset [Week 1

Page Title

Cyber Security: An Offensive Mindset [Week 1 - Reflection]

Reflection

During the initial stage of the project, the Stakeholders were briefly involved facilitating the strict medium that was necessary as static sites are more secure as stated and they advised on slight layout preferences that they expected. However, there were no significant discussions in regards to identifying the problem and thorough scope wasn't queried or recorded on my behalf. Therefore, this week I haven't met the expected SLO requirement this week for engagement with stakeholders. In regards to design thinking I believe this was something that I focused on a significantly during this weeks sprint, I tried to make the simplest viewing experience making it as easy as possible for the viewer to observe the content on my webpage. I kept prototyping my webpage using "hugo server -D" or "hugo server" command, but to my surprise I thought all the prototyping without testing the final "git push" wouldn't be an issue. But I was very wrong, after I made substantial changes during my prototyping stay I tried to deploy the changes to my live web page and found many issues with a lot of content not displaying. After a lot of troubleshooting I ended up having to change themes entirely as my static sight was not how I envisaged during the earlier stages of the design thinking. I believe that this SLO is of great importance if I didn't follow a structured approach and tested properly well before the sprints due date, I could have been without anything to show for my hard work this week. During this weeks sprint my technical skills have definitely been put to the test, challenging the way I think and forced me to develop better researching skills as I believe I used google for 95% of the project to overcome errors and issues that I faced. Something that I really needed time to get my head around was how each component fits together to enable a static webpage to be possible incorporating a domain, Netlify and Github. But with research and a lot of trial and error I got to the finished product in Figure 1 shows the Netlify Hugo Version error I had with deploying my site, which was definitely the biggest hurdle I faced requiring me to update the version of Hugo on Netlify itself. Over the course of the sprint I definitely evolved learning how to use markdown, Linux terminal, vim (Text editor) and Github. One issue that I did have significant trouble with was utilising vim efficiently, I had times when I didn't save files correctly and many other obstacles but I am on the road to mastering it. Really glad I got to take part in this sprint my own domain is something I've been excited to do for a long time, I'm glad I was able to gained these crucial technical skills. I have also posted my clear and concise notes that I created whilst developing my technical skills in my blog post Cyber Security: An Offensive Mindset [Week One - Sprint].

Figure 1: Netlify Hugo Version Error

I believe that collaboration has been extremely vital for myself this week utilising my communication skills to conversate with my peers as well as the facilitators, asking for help and clarification to overcome obstacles that have arisen. It was interesting to find that my peers had also come across very similar issues that I had faced and were able to pass on their experience with me. This was very noticeable on Wednesday during the non-class hours being in the FEIT Learning Precinct (FLP), I was quite stuck and still lacking a clear understanding of how the static site was functioning. But by the end of the day I had a fully deployed static site which I could start making necessary changes to and it was a testament to how valuable collaboration was. As seen below in Figure 2 it is evidence of use of Microsoft teams as a very useful collaborating and communication tool, which certainly assisted me in overcoming the issue I had with adding images to my static webpage.

Figure 2: Evidence of Collaboration on Microsoft Teams

A thorough review and performance evaluation is definitely warranted after this weeks sprint, I found that I focused way too much time on the aesthetic and configuration of my static webpage. Fast forward and my theme had too many issues and wasn't displaying certain parts of content when the live site was deployed. This forced me to scrap the theme entirely and lost all the extra hours I put in where ever possible, this is a testiment to my lack of time mangement skills. I then had to start fresh with a new theme and structured my time out, with a limited amount of time I am proud of the quality I was able to produce so close to the due date. But I will never be letting myself go through this scenario in any of my future sprints or into the future, I will be focusing signifcantly over the next 5 weeks to experiment and evolve in regards to my time management skills. As shown in Figure 3 the most frustrating part is that I attempted to target my time management skills in this sprint, but I still struggled so I will again use my new program "notion" but in a more structured fashion to better my performance in the next sprint.