MegaLeon

My fiancee is a talented cosplayer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosplay), but she is also one of the most disorganised persons I know. I decided to try and develop a SaaS web application that would be useful to her and other cosplayers - as well as giving a shot at developing something more ambitious than my usual side projects.

You can find the result at https://cosflowy.com/

I used the Meteor JS framework (https://www.meteor.com/) - I had a great experience with it and I don't think it gets enough love - I know it might not scale as well as other, lower-level solutions but it got a beginner web developer like me to put together and ship a usable product, which I think is no small feat.

I used Meteor's proprietary hosting service, Galaxy, which is pricier than something like Digital Ocean with the same specs but I didn't want to spend too much time on devops, so I'm willing to pay the extra for one-click deployment out of the box. I also used Mlab to host the mongo database, Google Cloud to host user-uploaded files, and Stripe to process the subscription flow.

In my company we distribute media content to be accessed through a mobile app to several clients. Right now the workflow is to build a separate version of the app for each client (functionality is 100% the same, the embedded media content changes) and distribute it confidentially via testflight. This, of course, is very slow and cumbersome.

I have built a proof of concept where the media is separated from the core application. The content is hosted online and when the client inputs a request code, checks if matches with any content and downloads it to the device. Right now the workflow is:

  * the user enters a code
  * a json file hosted online is downloaded read to see if the code matches any entry
  * if so, it gets the online address of the media content from that entry and downloads it

It's a very basic and naive system. My supervisors, however, loved it and want me to push this system to production level and use it with clients.

Thing is, we deal with extremely confidential content and could get in lots of trouble if any of it leaks out or if the clients were to access the wrong content. Right now everything is hosted publicly on a server of mine to test the proof of concept. My knowledge of web security is limited to SSL and that's it - I am slowly piling up resources to read and hope to educate myself enough to make a functional product out of it.

If you were me, what steps would you take into making this process as secure as it needs to be?

Most of my daily activity revolves around coding, whether for work or for personal projects.

Thing is, I have never received a formal programming education and my typing style is very "improvised" - whatever my hands got used to while growing up using a PC - I only use my index finger on the right hand, and three fingers on the left hand.

Work gets done comfortable fast, but I wonder whether I should try and force myself to learn how to touch type properly. I tried giving it a shot for a while and if I choose to commit to it I can see myself having to go through lots of frustration due to slowness and clunkyness as my hands re-learn how to type.

Has anyone gone through a similar process?