Identifying my Strength by using the test in www.strengthsquest.com it was really a good experience in Career Connections Course. Being one of Humber college students, I received this privilege to access the test and discover my strengths, which are different from the classic ones. The test result was built on different questions related to person’s attitudes, personality, feelings, and values. By the end of the test, each student received his/her top five Strengths, I think each one discovered at least one strength that he or she had never thought they have it. Knowing my strength exactly will help me to use my potential power and sharing these strengths with my team will open extra doors for us as team members to understand each one’s skills in order to employee them in building our projects. This workshop reminded me with the True Colors workshop in the first semester, each student had also to share his true color with other students.

I think this semester will be more intensive and have a lot of work to do than the first one: for the PHP class we are moving fast through the textbook chapters, the same with the XML book, building two different CMS websites, and determine the security and the quality assurance for each project. PHP language makes more sense to me because we can follow the logic of programming; there are no plugins or built-in libraries to add like ASP.NET. Everything I need to achieve, I have to code it by myself, which is why I like using PHP for back-end development more than using ASP.NET at least for the time being. Although, building a website with ASP.NET will be faster using the master pages, form validation, and for sure an advanced IDE like Visual Studio plus other extra features like the design view of visual studio, but I like the challenge that I experience when I use a simple software like NetBeans or Komodo in writing PHP code. It reminds me with the old days when I had to create my university project using the low-level C language. As many CMS are built using WordPress and Drupal, mastering PHP is necessary to me in order to customize those kinds of CMS and add more functionality by creating my own plugins.

Exploring the computer security and going deep in this field in Security and Quality Assurance Course was also something interesting, how to protect users from themselves? That is the idea of the security; we will go through different areas and aspects that we have never explored before. Right now, all the information are theoretically delivered but then when we start doing or applying this information into our codes, the task will become more understandable make more sense. Understand the security issues behind building a web application is something very necessary and crucial for us if we really need to be professional web developers.