I have spent 4 years of my life in this institution, Monash University Malaysia. During two, or even three of those years in my studies, I have spent them online due to the pandemic. It interesting that this blog itself was started during the pandemic. At that time, the blog was a simpler, with no paginate, with just this index page. Over time, I evolve it to firstly include my resume then, I added the grade page to make communicating with my supervising scholars easier. That was never accomplish. It seems that my supervisor weren’t a fan of looking at my blog and would prefer I tell them my result each time.
During this time, it would be arrogant and a remiss for me to say that I did not grow at all. Even though a lot of times, I felt like I haven’t grew at all throughout my studies, I did learn. I did grow as a person and my values has changed from before the pandemic. I still have a lot of the flaws that I had even before I began my studies but overall, I am a way better programmer, and I am way more inclined to take on new challenges from back there.
I have written a lot about my time in this institution and what I learned throughout my study. As I begin my next chapter in life, I want to take a moment to reminisce and appreciate the time that I have spent there. Like all students, my time was not “all sunshines and rainbows” as Rocky said. I didn’t struggle as much as Rocky did though. So, this post is dedicated to listing my acomplishments and what I did during that time that wasn’t already listed in any other articles.
Index
1. Final Year project
My course is named Bachelor Degree of Software Engineering (Hons.). The additional (Hons.) at the end of the course title typically mean that the course includes a level of study beyond the standard that you would expect from a typical bachelor degree. This usually means a Final Year Project (FYP), a component of study that aims to simulate the research method and process of a graduate student. My FYP was done under the unit FIT4003, Software Engineering Research Project. A unique experience of my FYP compared to most other FYP would be that it is completed within a span of 1 semester or 12 weeks.
1.1. Topic
The topic that my team picked fo the Final Year Project is titled “Secure Coding for Software Developers”. The goal and aim of the research was to uncover how different backgrounds, traits, and characteristics of developers can influence their adherence, and approach to Secure Coding, which is how the security is implemented in the codebasee of a system.
The research was done under the helm of HumaniSE lab from Monash University Australia, and under the supervision of Dr. Anuradha Madugalla. I think it stands for Humanity in Software Engineering. It is a lab focused on doing social science research within the field and culture surrounding Software Engineering.
The image above shows the process that we took for the Final Year Project. The main point is to focus on gathering data from working software developers on their background, and their general thoughts. Then, we identify different themes from the qualitative data, and quantify the data to the themes. We take the quantitative data and perform correlation analysis to find any trends between how the background, and traits of the developers can influence their thoughts and approach on secure coding.
1.2. Challenges
The first hurdle that we have to overcome within this project was to convince the board of ethics on our approach and gathering of personal data from our participants. I thought it was going to be difficult but it really wasn’t. They were mainly concerned with how we will gather, store, and release these data containing private information. We have to ensure that the participants are aware of the nature of the project, are aware of their consent to participate, and can withdraw at any point. Their data must be stored securely, within a password protected account, shared to selected people, and ananomyzed.
The second hurdle was on the gathering of participants for our project. Due to the requirements that we have for our participants, it was difficult to find participants for our project. We targeted 50 participants, which is low and ended up gathering 24, less than half of what we wanted. That really affected the quality of the research.
The third hurdle was with the limited data, our analysis was kinda bad. Because of the lack of participants, it’s difficult to tell when a particular trend is because of the randomized character of the participants or because that is the actual trend in the industry.
1.3 My Opinion
My personal opinion on the fyp is that I kinda regretted choosing this because it wasn’t a technical project and it’s not something that I am interested in looking in. Nevertheless, I did learn a lot about various matters that I wouldn’t have known without doing this project, being the ethics of data gathering, and also performing qualitative and quantitative data analysis.
One particular that I noticed and I am not sure whether this is due to the difference in culture between Malaysia and Australia but when I look up graduate studies for Malaysian Tik Tok, it’s always a slurry of people telling you to read 10,20, and even 50 articles per day. Our supervisor never emphasized on reading too much, even advised us to read more smartly. I am not sure whether this is due to the difference between the Malaysian supervisors and Australian supervisors.
1.4 Advice for Others
This is an advice most professors wil tell their students that I agree with. In general, you should avoid doing group work with your friends, just because they’re your friends. I chose my groupmates during my final year project because they have a reputation of being more involved when it comes to group work. I have known some of them but, I wasn’t that close with them. To me, it was a matter of knowing that they’re generally dependable and easy to work with.
If possible, do try to do fyp on your interests. It can add value to your resume in the field that you’re interested in. Because of my fyp is social science oriented, it was difficult for me to justify to the interviewer on the possible relationship it could have to my workplace. However, I do have to admit that in general, most projects will offer some kind of value that will add your work skills.
2. Studio Project
I wanted to talk about how I improved a certain year long project but then, I realize, I never talked about the year long project to begin. So, here’s the gist of it. Back in 2021, I was involved in a year long project to develop an ecosystem of apps. So, think of how Twitter has both the website version, and the mobile version. Both version of the application are then, connected to a backend server via APIs. So, our group was involved in something similar to this.
The project was dubbed “Seizure Prediction and Prevention”. The goal of the project was to do just that, to develop an ecosystem of devices, and applications to retrieve, store, and analyse health data such that the patient’s seizure can be predicted before it happened and help could be given. Sounds ambitious? Well, it was.
At the end of the year long project, we didn’t achieve the main objective of the project, to develop a system to predict seizures based on the health data. To be fair, our lecturers did not want us to do that part and would prefer that we work on the basis of the applications. That’s fair, we are software engineers after all not health data experts. Among the 15 people split equally into 3 groups, we managed to create a mobile application, a web application, and a backend server to connect the two. We actually manage to make it such that the patient could be assigned a doctor, both parties could receive notification, and the doctor can see data from a patient. Even though I think it’s not that good for the industry standard but I think we did the best we can given the circumstances.
That was done with FIT3170, under the supervision of Dr. Chong Chun Yong, a very hardworking and dedicated staff of the school. Then come last year, we continued on the project. We being, 3 of my friends from FIT3170, and 2 new students. We managed to improve the mobile application such that it can now collect data from various devices, and we touch up on the web application. I did work on backend that allowed the mobile apps to connect to telegram. It felt like something small and unlikely to be used but I am proud of that.
3. Final Result
At the end of the course, I managed to get a whooping 80.273 as my wam. Just barely enough to graduate first class but, I’m still proud of my achievement. I know I didn’t accomplish much outside of academics and that is one thing I regretted throughout my studies if I have to mention it. I have to acknowledge that throughout my studies, I was not in a right state of mind and I didn’t have the right attitude to properly get the maximum use of Monash University Malaysia.
There’s a lot I still have to learn in my life. I felt like I haven’t grown at all although I’ve experienced a lot in the four years time. Given my time there, I feel a bit of guilt for not connecting with those from the school and being so preoccupied with studying until I neglected those arround me. I tend to say a lot of offensive stuff to my lecturers and friends and I wish to fix this, honestly.
Here’s to a better life in the future.