Stidd's Journal

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Latest — May 6, 2024

Distributed Thinking

The class I took this last semester, Distributed Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology, was challenging. I suspect all distributed computing courses are of similar difficulty. I learned an unexpected skill that I assume will be a powerful asset in the future—the ability to reason through complex distributed algorithms. more...

Whether you're a team of one or many, writing small software projects is a great way to learn new languages and technologies and can be the beginning of a great product.

I'm Jason Stidd; I work on small projects at work, in my spare time, and for school. Please join me as I explore new (and old) technologies, methods, and designs.

More issues

Diagrams

In school, I am taking a distributed computing class. In past classes I would start programming the assignments and experimenting to figure out the programming language we are using and the topic in general. I have a pretty good understanding by the time I finish, but I'm also

Focusing on Security First

In the newest application I am creating for work, I've taken a security first approach. In a past project, I built most of the application with security measures through out, then tagged on the remaining security at the end. This made it harder to test while building. And

A Team of One

Although I work at a medium size company, for the past 11 years I have worked in a small department doing both IT and software development. At times I'm almost exclusively programming, other times I'm program about 50% of the time. The frustrating part is that,

Learning C

My first assignment at Georgia Institute of Technology was written in C. I thought I knew enough about C to get by on a simple project involving network programming using sockets. I was wrong. It is simple enough to learn the basics of C, but the basics are very shallow.

Attack Detection vs Prevention - The Importance of Complete Logs

In my early projects, I did my best to prevent attacks, but I should have done a better job in detecting attacks. I did a lot of logging troubleshooting and eventually started logging for insight into user actions (again, just for troubleshooting). However, I did not thoroughly log ALL login

Want to Learn to Program? Words of Encouragement!

Because I focus on small projects, I expect some people who reach my posts may be beginners or just thinking about learning to program. This post is for you. This is not a guide about how to get started, which resources to use, or a list of free or paid

Communication - An Important Part of Software Development

I have found that communication is a very important part of software development, especially important when working with non-developer team members. As you can tell from my writing, I am not the strongest communicator, but I have worked on improving throughout the years. In January I will be taking an

The Dangers of Side Work

Side work sounds great. You build experience and confidence. You learn to work through challenges and work as part of a team. However, there are downsides to side work - at least for me. Early on, when I didn't know much about programming and my job was in

Valuable Ideas

I am always trying to think of valuable ideas that will earn me a quick million dollars or create an excellent resume builder. Often, I come up with these ideas only to later get bored of them, forget them, or, most honestly, realize they weren't good ideas at