E6: Reflecting on Assignment 3

15 Dec 2023

Briefly describe your system (e.g. A store selling Pokemon game cards)

My website sells yugioh cards and products. There are three different types each with multiple items. There is one tab for different types of booster boxes, one for booster packs, and another for accessories. These accessories include things such as card sleeves, playmats, and card binders.

Any notable shortcomings, bugs, problems, or additional features not implemented?

Yes, there were a few. I still feel a little shakey when it comes to the understanding of cookies and sessions. I struggled to update the cart values, and, although it eventually worked, this took a lot of time. Also, my individual requirement tasked me with presenting the last transaction data for an individual when they returned to my website. Although I was able to implement a session that allowed me to track the last time of purchase, I struggled to pull the quantities from the shopping cart and reference those shopping cart quantities to my actual products.

Describe what you are most proud of about your system:

I am most proud of my transferring of cookies from different routes and client pages. I was successfully able to personalize each webpage (something I really struggled with in Assignment 2).

Describe what you are least happy with your system:

I am least happy with the lack of time that I was able to put into my CSS, which resulted in my overall website looking bland. I spend so much time focusing on actually getting my website to function, that I did not have much time available to actually design and create a unique and nice looking website.

How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2?

As stated before, this assignment had us use cookies and sessions rather than feeding lots of values through the query string. Although this was much more convenient, it was like I had to learn an entirely new thing just when I was starting to get comfortable with using the URLs and query strings.

When you ran into a problem, what did you do to address it?

I typically relied on online resources such as forums or chatGPT; however, there were many times had to rely solely on the debugger, or just trying to see what values my variables had in the chrome inspect console. These debuggers were by far the most reliable and valuable tool not only with this assignment, but for the entire class.

Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

My debugging skills have become much better in assignment 3, and that might be due to better planning on my part. In assignment 2, I spent the majority of my time debugging my errors; however, with assignment 3, I spent a lot more time trying to figure out how I wanted to do things, in order for me to spend less time fixing things.

Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment?

I had a hard time with time management during this assignment. Because we had an extension on assignment 2, we had less time to work on assignment 3. This coupled with finals time, meant that I should have started working on this assignment while assignment 2 was being finished up. Of course, that is not what happened..

What did you learn from doing this assignment?

I learned that compared to the start of this class, I have grown and learned a lot. I am proud of my coding abilities and feel much more confident. Looking back on past WODS makes me realize just how much I have learned.

Estimate the % of time you spent (a) thinking about how to do something, (b) writing code (but do not include testing, (c) testing and debugging

For this assignment, I would say that I spent about 40% thinking, 30% writing, and 30% testing and debugging.

Assign an estimated percentage on the amount each team member contributed to the assignment (including yourself) and explain briefly your rationale for the percentage breakdown. Be sure to include an overview of what specifically you and your partners contributed (e.g. “I worked on the security and my partner 1 worked on personalization”)

I did not work with a partner :(