Class Retrospective

13 May 2022

Briefly describe your system

My system is a functioning web store that sells steaks of three different qualities.

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

I struggled to implement my individual requirement which did not feel great. I spent three days on the implimintation of that alone and still could not get it to work after all of that time. If I had more time though, I am not even sure I would have figured out the issue. I was also limited in my testing of sending emails as I was only able to test it on the network once.

Describe what you are most proud of about your system:

I think I am proud of the system generally, if you told me at the start of the semester that I be able to build an application like this I probably would have said no way. Even though I struggled a lot in this course I learned a lot which is what I think counts.

Describe what you are least happy with your system:

I am definitely least happy with the rating function, I worked on it for a lot of hours and still couldn’t get it to function properly.

How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2?

Developing this assignmnet required rebuilding almost the entire server because we were no longer using query strings to pass data, but sessions. I found this to be a lot more of an elegant solution as it made the data much more accessible and easy to get to regardless of what page you were on.

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

When I ran into a problem I would first make sure that all of my variables are spelled correctly and as I intend. If it still doesn’t work, I would often look stuff up on google with “Express JS” in the search which often provided some good answers. If i still wasn’t able to figure out the problem, I would reach out to Professor Port for assistance. Sometimes, I think I should’ve reached out earlier as apposed to struggling to figure it out myself over the course of hours or days.

Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

I found that using sessions was a lot easier than sending and parsing through query string to try and pull products that a user selected. I also liked that we build the store pages using a loop so that it is easy to add on more product categories.

Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment?

I struggled a lot with the individual requirement which also caused me to not fufill other parts of the project.

What did you learn from doing this assignment?

I learned a lot about designing a system that will work front to end. I gained a lot more experience working with sessions, cookies, and creating routes.

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

I would definitely have reached out sooner to Professor Port in regards to struggling to complete my individual requirement. By the time I realized that there was no way I was going to figure it out on my own, it was already close to the submission date.

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

a. 70%, b. 20%, c. 10%