Assignment 3 Retrospective Blog

12 May 2023

Briefly describe your system:

My website is a small store that sells clothes. You can purchase 3 different clothing items. These clothing items are shirts, shorts, and socks. Each of these clothing items has 6 different colors that you can choose from to purchase.

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

Two bugs that I could not figure out include my invoice email sometimes not including all of the data on the invoice, and my invoice sometimes having the wrong data on it. I tried to figure out what was wrong with it but I just couldn’t, so I left them in there. The website still works well though.

Describe what you are most proud of about your system:

I am most proud of being able to get the email to send to the user after the invoice has been completed. This was annoying to figure out because of googles security features and I ended up having to use a throwaway email to make it work.

Describe what you are least happy with your system:

The thing with my website that I am least happy about is how much of a mess the code is. I wasn’t able to organize it very well and I have around 800 lines of code in just my server.js file.

How was developing this assignment different than assignment 2?

Developing this assignment was different than assignment 2 because it involved a lot more effort and working things out on my own. Trying to get everything to work was a huge pain but luckily I figured it all out in the end.

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

I would often use ChatGPT or Google to figure out what was not working in my code. If I was starting to get annoyed at something I would take a break from the code and do something else.

Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

Taking my time and not trying to rush on this assignment. I spread out working on this assignment over multiple days which helped the stress and annoyance levels that I had

Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment?

I kind of procrastinated on this assignment and waited until the last week to finally work on it. I was so focused on my other classes that I saved this class for last.

What did you learn from doing this assignment?

I learned that I can create some awesome code if I put my mind to it and work hard. This website was more than I ever imagined I could create on my own.

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

I would pay more attention in class, often in class I would zone out if I had already completed the step in the lab that we were on and I did not listen to the professor.

Estimate the % of the time you spent (a) thinking about how to do something, (b) writing code (but do not include testing, (c) testing and debugging.

I spent around 40% of the time thinking about how I was going to do something, 20% of the coding something, and 40% of the time testing and debugging what I had written.

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

I did all of the work myself as I did not work with other people.