Samir's Portfolio

Author: ssunuwar

  • The Importance of Website Backups

    The Importance of Website Backups

    Scenario

    Imagine you’re scrolling through the backend code of your website’s html document until poof. You somehow delete all of the content by accident and can’t retrieve it. You now have no way to redo your mistake and now you’re left with a large chunk of your website gone. This can be a harsh situation to be in, that’s unless you saved a backup of your website. Website backups are a saved ‘checkpoint’ of your website from a certain time. These ‘checkpoints’ contain the information of the website from the given time it was saved. It’s important to ensure that you backup your websites in case it falls into the hands of the scenario you just read (Or even worse scenarios!).

    Types of Backups

    There are 3 Well-known types of backups. Full, incremental, & differential backups. Full backups are the simplest type of backup there is. Full backups save everything from a certain point of time. Differential backups are backups that save changes since the last full backup, they can be demonstrated on the picture to the right. Incremental backups are backups that save changes since the last backup. This means that incremental backups could really save changes from itself, differential, or full backups. If we were to scale these from most to least ‘complex’, it would go Full Backup–>Differential Backup–>Incremental Backup.

    Consequences of an Un-backed website.

    There are many consequences to not backing up your website. It can be as simple as accidentally deleting your data and being unable to retrieve it. Sometimes files may corrupt and you’re left with corrupted work. Hackers can also implement malware and hack your website. Honestly, there are just too much consequences of not backing up your website that there’s really no reason to keep it waiting.

    The GitLab Incident.

    According to this source, a GitLab database administrator deleted data from their main database server by accident in 2017. The deletion resulted in 5,000 projects and 700 user accounts lost. However, it definitely could have been much worse if not for the GitLab team backing up critical client data on other servers. This truly demonstrates that a simple backup could really save you from large amounts of damage, as happened to the GitLab team. Even though they’d just lost a ton of data, they were able to restore the critical client data thanks to backing it up on mirror servers. Really shows how important backing up is.

    Conclusion.

    Now that we’ve gone over the importance of website backups, let’s recap. A website backup is a saved ‘checkpoint’ of your website data from a certain time. There are 3 types of backups—Full backups, differential backups, & incremental backups. If you don’t backup your website, you risk losing important information from your website. We’ve went over that backing up websites has saved big websites from collapsing, as said in the ‘GitLab Incident’. Now that you know the importance of website backups, what are you waiting for? When it comes to backing up your website, you really have nothing to lose!

  • 3 Reasons to be Excited About Web Development & Design

    3 Reasons to be Excited About Web Development & Design

    Have you ever scrolled through a really badly made website and thought, “Wow, this site sucks….”? And then you scroll through an actually well made one like Apple.com and notice the big difference. The makers behind all of that are actually web developers & designers. There’s a lot of reasons to be excited about web development & design. The 3 things on what I believe is to be most excited about web development & design is the creativity aspect, the problem solving aspect, & that your work is constantly changing with trends & design styles. All of these sound very vague as of right now, but allow me to explain.

    The first reason I mentioned to be most excited about web development & design is the open creativity it requires. Assuming you’ve already read about every other students portfolio, I’m assuming you’ve already heard this reason for the 50th time—because I can tell it sounds like a very common reason to choose. But it’s true though. Even in both the design or development aspect you can still be creative. For design, this is self-explanatory. Everything you design is what you express. It’s what you think fits what you’re looking for. It’s like a mental playground because you can play around to see what works as a design & what doesn’t. For development, creativity can be a lot of things, but I’ll go with the way you can come up with a solution. When trying to come up with a piece of ‘show’ on a website, (in most cases) there will be no definite piece of code that makes it happen. This means one person could have a completely different approach to writing the ‘same’ type of code than another. It really demonstrates the creativity of people

    The second reason I want to talk about to be most excited about web development & design is the problem solving of it. As a web developer, you will constantly face problems in your code. If you did something wrong in your code, it’s up to you to find out what you did wrong and how you can improve it. Sometimes you’ll be sitting a chair for 4 minutes not knowing why your code isn’t working. That’s alright, you can look up to help you around so you actually know what to do the next time you come across the same problem. If you get better & faster at smaller problems, solving bigger problems can also come easier to you. It’s a very brain engaging process and I would deem it enjoyable. I can only assume others would too.

    The last reason I want to talk about to be the most excited about web development & design is that your work will constantly be changing with time. The world is constantly changing, and with a changing world comes changing trends. As a web developer AND designer, you will be constantly producing new types of work over years and won’t be dealing with the same things every single year. I think it’s probably the most ‘fun’ thing about my reasons, because it’s one of the most impacting. This will constantly test your creativity and you will face new problems along the way with the newer trends coming in, which is why I put it last.

    Really, there is so much things that’s to be excited about web. It can bring out your creativity & problem solving skills and constantly bring new ideas to you and other web designers & developers. I can’t even finish the list to describe all the possibilities to be excited about web. Honestly though, it’s all up to the person. All of these reasons were come up by me & why I think you should be excited for web. It’s all preference on the person really. Just try for yourself & see what excitement it has to offer you.

    Source for paragraph 4