Reflecting on Assignment 2 Technical Essay
24 Nov 2020
^ Bad habit, I tend to go straight into coding without thinking or consulting other resources for help or guidance
Introduction
Assignment 2 required us to add a login and registration page to our assignment 1 project, as well as consider how to use persistent and transient data in terms of storing user data from the registration.Here is the link to the assignment.
What did you learn from this assignment?
I learned that it is important to wisely name objects, because if they’re named the same thing then the page doesn’t process correctly. That specifically caused a problem when I was trying to get the quantities string to go from the login to the invoice, since my form “login_form” was located in a div also called “login_form”, the quantities string wasn’t passing to the invoice correctly.
Did you work with a partner?
I didn’t work with a partner, but I had some discussions with Justina about the assignment and we helped each other out for some parts.
How did you get help when you needed it? What did you need help with?
If I needed help, I would go to Professor Port for an office hour. For example, I needed help because my quantity string wasn’t being transported from the login page to the invoice and I had no clue why it wasn’t working, so I needed help figuring that out.
How was developing this assignment different than assignment #1?
Ahh, developing assignment 2 was different compared to assignment 1 because we had to implement different functions, however I think that assignment 2 was a little easier than assignment 1 since it required a little less coding. Starting assignment 1 was more stressful because it was literally like, “What am I doing.. How do I start this…I’ve never done this before…” but starting assignment 2 was like “Ohh okay I know what I need to do, this is familiar”.
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
I probably spent 20% thinking how to do something, 40% writing code, and 40% testing and debugging. Looking at this, I really need to do more thinking so that I can lessen the need of having to write more code or test/debug stuff.
Describe what worked well with this project? What did not work well?
What worked well with this project was making the visuals of the login/registration page. I like how it looks and it matches the theme of the other pages. What didn’t work well was trying to figure out a way to show errors on the page next to the textbox that had the error (like a “Username is too short” message in red). There’s a similar mechanism like this on my products display page, but I had a hard time trying to modify it for the login/registration page.
If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you do differently?
If I could go back in time, I would have dedicated more time towards working on assignment 2. I feel as if I didn’t spend a lot of time as I could have trying to make it better. Also, I would have used Google more if I had a problem or if I wanted to implement something but didn’t know how to.