E6: Evaluation Guidelines and Class Retrospective BLOG

12 May 2023

The following below is a evaluation/reflection on my experience completing Assignment 3

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

I created an eCommerce website called “Crazy Cookies” that sells cookies, ingredients, and kitchenware.

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

Although I was able to send quantities to the user’s session, I was unable to pull it and display it onto the shopping cart page. I was also unable to send the user’s invoice to their email. I also could not complete my IR because I could not complete the main requirements of Assignment 3.

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

I am most proud of my products page. I was able to allow users to switch between the different product pages without having to create separate pages for each product. The concept of outputting it was a challenge that I was glad to overcome.

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

I am unhappy that I was not able to finish Assignment 3’s main requirements. As of writing this, I could not get the quantities to display in the user’s cart which means that I cannot proceed with the invoice page.

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

Assignment 3 required the use of sessions and cookies to store the user’s information when adding to their shopping cart. Unlike assignment 2, this assignment requires you to incorporate a functioning shopping cart. It also tasks you to send an invoice to the user’s email address this time.

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

When I ran into a problem, I usually searched about it on the Internet and if I was really stuck, I attended the Professor’s office hours for guidance and help. I also had to refer to some of the previous labs we did in class (mainly the cookies and sessions lab).

7. Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

Looking over the Assignment 3 examples really helps if you take the time to understand it line by line. The examples were straightforward and helped put me in the right direction when I got stuck.

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

I think that starting on this assignment late definitely did not work well for me. If I had more time, then I would have been able to address most of the problems my website currently has.

9. What did you learn from doing this assignment?

From this assignment, I learned how cookies and sessions worked to store user data. I also learned about nodemailer and how it only works on the server side. A take away I learned from this assignment is that there are many different ways to approach each requirement and that is it just a matter of preference.

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

If I could go back in time and do things differently, I would have started on this Assignment the moment it was assigned. Although it is not as heavy on the coding aspect as Assignment 2, it takes a lot of thinking to even get one part to work.

11. 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 spent 60% of my time thinking about how to do something, 25% of the time writing code, and 15% of my time debugging code. This assignment was very flexible in how to approach things you want to accomplish. Whenever I had an idea and tried to implement it, my website would face errors that I would have to fix.

12. 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 worked on my own for Assignment 3.