Assignment 2 for ITM352 was updating our Assignment 1 sale website to include a login and register page. I had to make users create an account and log into it if they wanted to purchase a product from the store. I also had to save all of the user data and overwrite it any time someone created a new account on the website. The link to the requirements for Assignment 2 is this: https://dport96.github.io/ITM352/morea/150.Assignment2/experience-Assignment2.html
I learned from this assignment how to create a user database and how to have it constantly updated with new information. I did not know how to create a login and register page before working on this assignment and learning how to do so was incredibly difficult. I also learned how to use POST and GET requests much better than how I was using them just a couple of weeks ago.
I did not work with a partner for this assignment and I did all of the work myself.
When I needed help with the assignment I either did some research on the topic that I was struggling with or I went to the professor’s office hours. I ended up needing help with preventing the user from getting to the invoice page by typing it directly into the URL so I looked up how to prevent this. I also needed help getting my website to run on the VM so I went to one of the office hours meetings to get help with it.
This assignment was different than Assignment 1 because it involved much more intricate and advanced coding in my opinion. I struggled a lot with getting everything to work right and eventually I was just able to brute force everything to work. I think that Assignment 1 went a lot more smoothly than Assignment 2 because I struggled a lot more on this one.
I think I spend around 40% of my time thinking about how to do something, as I would often just sit at my desk and look at my computer for long periods thinking about what I should do. I spent probably around 30% of my time writing code, as I would often only write a couple of lines at a time and then think about what I was going to do next. I spent the last 30% of my time working on testing and debugging. This was because I encountered a lot of issues with my website originally and had to slowly work on fixing each issue one at a time. I think overall I spent around 20 to 30 hours working on this assignment.
I think what worked well on this project was thinking outside of the box and using code that I did research myself instead of using the code that we worked on in class. A lot of the things that I needed to do with my website were just not working the way they should have so I began to look outside of the box to solve my issues. Something that did not work that well with this project was using AI to help with my issues. At one point my code became so long that it was unreadable by any AI software and I was on my one when it came to solving issues that I had in my code.
If I could go back in time and do things differently I would most likely rewrite my entire code. This is because it has reached a point where it is borderline impossible to add something to my website without breaking 10 other things. I think that if I rewrote the code better it would have helped me a lot when it came to stress and things not working right.