Jason Stidd

Topics fly by when learning them in school. The rapid pace and frantic struggle to keep up with assignments and lectures while reading seminal journal articles make me feel like I forget the material as quickly as I learn. Two weeks out of class, I wonder if I learned anything.

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.

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

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

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,

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.

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

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