DEV Community: Virgo Clarity

Welp, my first hackathon

Virgo Clarity — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 16:16:14 +0000

I entered my first hackathon, Oh My. 😮

One of the communities that I am a part of sent out a flyer about a Hackathon. Hmm, hackathon... I'd love to try that. Hackathons always look fun, right? Why not give it a try?

I dove in and registered. 👯

Now as a rusty newbie, how in the world do you find project ideas? The theme is Social Good. So, I may cater my project more toward the mental health arena because it seems so many people state they need help but aren't able to obtain help.

My question for you, yes you ✨
How did you prepare or what helped you on your very first hackathon?

I won't be working with a team, solo dolo. I'd love to hear feedback on how your first hackathon was and your skill level going into it.
Thanks in advance for sharing.

Newbies and Documentation

Virgo Clarity — Sat, 27 Jun 2020 17:36:06 +0000

As a cybersecurity "student", I've discovered quickly that you are NEVER truly secure. You gain understanding and minimize the damage. There is no true prevention though. This is with anything in life actually.

The amount of material, resources and tools can be dangerous to use. Your life and others may be changed in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine. What's my point in all of this? As a "student", documentation is crucial. Tell us how to use these items CLEARLY.

The lack of clear documentation has been a consistent frustration for me. For example, if I join an intro course to learn, it will say to connect to OpenVPN and test your connection. I download OpenVPN, then... what do I do next? How do I safely and accurately connect while also making sure that I'm working within my Virtual Machine and etc? The goal for some students is proceeding with confidence that they (myself included) are not exposed while learning tools that help others to remain safe. Don't get me wrong, playing bad guy with permission is a lovely perk too. You have to be able to break into it, fix the route you used to break into it, and make the "it" more secured.

Back to what I was saying, if you are a course creator, instructor, or sharer of knowledge, please make sure that the documentation is clear. Make sure the documentation doesn't assume that certain knowledge is already present. Provide a section of commonly asked questions with answers. Provide resources that link to acquiring more info that may be needed for setup, for troubleshooting, and for a community that is trustworthy and can get you pointed in the right direction.

Just a few tips from my mind to yours

Now, how do I make sure I am connected to OpenVPN? How do I make sure that Kali Linux is installed on my VMware? And how do I make sure both of those are working together so I can install a package to the Kali Linux Machine? Come on, you knew there was motivation behind this post 😊

I'm also going to share this post on my personal blog so I can get more feedback. Never can have too much info.

Um, What's Next

Virgo Clarity — Sat, 30 May 2020 00:44:40 +0000

Well, I guess this will be my first post. Woot Woot.
What better way to start than to share what I've been working on and gather direction/feedback as well.

What have I been working on?

Basically, a friend presented me with the opportunity to work on an app over the course of 8 weeks. Sure, I love to challenge myself so I'm game. Plus, we would have a team of 4-5 so that will be extra support. Over the course of the weeks, things change and now it's just the two of us (friend and I). NO worries, let's keep pushing for these two weeks.

We are working on an app that's a digital registry. This is where I decided to build the app with Python Flask and use SQL Alchemy/ MySQL as the database.

Get to the point

The app portion is built and tied to ngrok in order for my partner to see it. Her speciality is front-end so... what do we do now?

I've worked with front-end on a solo aka local end. My dilemma is the collaboration portion.

What would my partner need to work on the front-end?
ngrok is only for display or preview purpose, correct?
Where do we go from here?

The great thing is progress has been made for this challenge, even if it will not be put out on a mass scale. Major kudos for making this far with two more weeks to go.

Um, what's next...crickets in my mind