Introduction
I am really happy how the finished project came out and I could not have gotten to this point without the collaboration of my peers. This class was extremely diffuclt and seemingly impossible at times considering my limited experience in programming. Our store offers the fundamental capabilities of a fully functioning e-commerce store. I am very proud of my work and have even showed friends and family my progress along the way as the store became more advanced over time.
Briefly describe your system (e.g. A store selling Pokemon game cards)
We created a store that sells Betta fish. Along with Betta fish, the store offers other products including fish tanks and plants to decorate the fish tank.
Any notable shortcomings, bugs, problems, or additional features not implemented? I do not think there are any shortcomings as far as I am concerned. The website was well thought out and all requirements have been met.
Describe what you are most proud of about your system: I am most proud to have a complete e-commerce store that is dynamic and presentable. This project took a lot of time and effort, so seeing a function working project is something I am extremely proud of. The design of the sight is really nice to me as well. Looking at other betta fish stores online, it seems that our store has a more user friendly design given our capabilities and software.
Describe what you are least happy with your system: It is hard to identify what I am least happy with our system. However, it would be optimal to not have thousands of lines of code. Instead, we should have created different files for different functions and called them into the server.
How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2? There are various ways in which we are developing Assignment 3 differently than Assignment 2. One of the biggest differences is that we are now a team of 3 members rather than 2. This allows us to come up with a variety of ideas and break the work up even further. This time we are also making sure to comment a lot more. Also, we are being extremely careful when pushing and pulling comments since we have 3 different computers merging into one repository branch. With that being said, we are also aiming to upload code incrementally to make sure it is tested and debugged before moving forward. We trying to come up with more readable variables so when other members are looking at the code it is easier to comprehend.
When you ran into a problem, what did you do to address it? First, we would confer with each other and try to solve the problem between ourselves. If we still had trouble figuring it out, then we would all look it up on external sources such as YouTube or Bootstrap. Sometimes we would reach out to other class peers to see if they had a similar problems and how to address it.
Describe what worked well in doing this assignment? Working as a team and communicating through discord worked extremely well. Sometimes working with others could become difficult due to communication barriers however discord was a perfect conduit to solving this issue and made collaboration easy which in turn made the project a lot easier.
Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment? Pushing code before pulling other team members codes did not work well so we learned to keep that in mind. Also, working on the project during late hours led to more mistakes.
What did you learn from doing this assignment? I learned that creating a full functioning e-commerce store is extremely difficult. Also a project like this is extremely time consuming and requires planning and careful thought.
If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you change? I would use more files to keep less lines of code in the server. Reading and double checking over 3,000 lines of code is extremely difficult. This also made debugging difficult.
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 75% of the time was spent how to do something and planning. 5% was spent writing and the remaining 20% was spent 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”) 45% is attributed to bobby because he did a lot of debugging, writing functions, and fixing issues from previous assignments. 30% is attributed to Alex since he worked a lot on the entire Admin portion in addition to debugging and adding various features across the website. The remaining 25% goes to me as I did some validation, UI designing including the, navigation bar, making sure comments are in place, and acting as the project manager making sure guidelines and deadlines are met as well as helping out wherever I could.
Conclusion I wouldn’t want to go back and change anything and am happy leaving the past in the past. However I would like to mention that this class is extremely advanced for people without coding experience and I am glad to complete it to the end. THe completion of this course alone feels like an accomplishment in itself, thank you. Not sure if I would want to commit that much time to a single class ever again. I appreciate the skills and knowledge earned despite the cost to time and slight sanity, just kidding, kind of :) Happy Holidays!