E6: Reflecting on Assignment 3

11 May 2023

1. Briefly describe your system

My store is a vintage camera store selling several different types of vintage camera products: digital camera, point & shoot, and super 8.

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

As of now, I’m still working to complete Individual Requirement 5 which requires that an average rating is displayed for each product that provides users with an opportunity to rate the products they purchased.

3. Describe what you are most proud of about your system:

Right now, it’s difficult to say that I’m proud of the online store I created because I’m still trying to incorporate IR5 which I hope to complete by 11:59p on Friday. That said, I’d like to believe that I’ll be proud of the online store that I created from scratch some day in the future.

4. Describe what you are least happy with your system:

Everything. There are too many features/functions to implement in such a short amount time with having very little skills or knowledge to code these particular sets features/functions. I’m burnt out. Probably not the best time to do the reflection but it’s my honest thoughts at the moment.

5. How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2?

Developing Assignment 3 is different than Assignment 2, mainly because Assignment 3 involves many more functions to integrate and consider, especially with the additional set of product types. With that, it requires a lot more planning than the other assignments. I still fell into the trap sometimes by jumping into some coding first which wasn’t beneficial in the long run.

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

Like any reasonable person would do running into problems, I looked it up to online to figure out how to address the problem, sometimes even checking with ChatGPT but even ChatGPT wasn’t very helpful. Mostly, the best method of addressing my issues was reaching out to Dr. Port when I exhausted all of my options online to figure out a solution.

7. Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

My head is not in the right space right now to determine what worked well because I’m still working to complete IR5. It’s been rough working with this last assignment, so it’s difficult to really reflect at this moment what worked well. I would be in a better position to reflect on this assignment a few weeks from now or maybe even months after.

8. Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment?

Isn’t this similar to question 4 above? Everything at this moment does not seem to be working well. There are so many parts to the assignment that it’s even difficult to keep track of the code. The big challenge was the added set of different product types to associate requirements for a particular product, e.g., 5-star rating for each product.

9. What did you learn from doing this assignment?

Coding is difficult. I’m not good at coding but I try. I hope that after I’m done with this assignment, I can look back on it one day and know that I learned something from doing this assignment, but right now, it’s difficult to see that, unfortunately. If I need to identify a few functions I learned doing this assignment, it’s how to use cookies and sessions. I haven’t mastered them, but I understand them better and how it can help to make your code more efficient.

10. If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you change?

Spend more time understanding how to code and what I’m doing, especially the last few classes of the semester, but we covered the material so quickly with little time to process and understand it, except as we’re doing now with this final assignment. This is rough.

11. If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you change?

I estimate that I spent 40% thinking about how to do something, 30% writing code and 30% testing and debugging… and 100% frustrated.

12. Assign an estimated percentage on the amount each team member contributed to the assignment

N/A