Articles

My Journey Building This Website

Introduction

Creating my own portfolio website from scratch has been an invaluable learning experience as cybersecurity professional who just loves programming. Through the challenges and lessons of this project, I believe to have grown tremendously on both a technical and personal level.

Motivations for the Project

I was drawn to deeply exploring the components needed for a hosted web application end-to-end after completing my capstone project. Building my own site was a chance to plan, code, test, and launch an app with total control of its direction. I also wanted to expand my skills by learning Go instead of relying on my familiarity with Python, Java, and other languages. Not to mention, I knew my front-end experience was minimal. In other words, I knew I had a steep learning curve ahead of me. But I was up for the challenge, ready to dive in headfirst and take it step-by-step.

The Obstacles Along the Way

I definitely faced a lot of challenges along the creation of this site. Aside from working full-time as a network manager for a cambridge school, I was working extra hours to propose and start our afterschool chess and cyber clubs. Even so, I was passionate about what I could learn and below are some of the problems that stood out along the way.

  • Learning Go whilst learning about web development practices
  • Gaining front-end development skills given minimal experience
  • Finding and configuring a hosting platform to run my Go application
  • Implementing proper security measures like input sanitization and secure headers
  • Designing a professional looking site with my limited design skills

While not always easy, I embraced the process of building, breaking, and rebuilding through long nights of hands-on work. And every time I faced a new bug or unexpected result, it felt as though each failure provided an valuable lesson.

The Lasting Impact on My Development

Beyond the technical knowledge gained, this experience shaped me as a developer in a few key ways:

  • I discovered the deep satisfaction of planning, building, and publishing a project from inspiration to completion.
  • Balancing roles like programmer, tester, and security specialist made me a more versatile professional.
  • Debugging issues thoroughly improved my troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
  • I emerged with greater confidence in my abilities after persevering through roadblocks.

Key Takeaways

Overall, this website has been a labor of love and growth. Even though it is not as perfect as an app from Google or Microsoft, the lessons and knowledge I gained have been invaluable. I’m proud to have pushed myself to create something meaningful from scratch and share it with the world. More specifically, you! With that, I cannot wait to continue developing my skills in both areas of security and software engineering.