Invoice1 was a challenge introducing variables and dynamic programming as a challenge. This WOD took me two attempts to finish but was not as difficult as I thought. During this WOD attempt, I looked over at the instructions beforehand to get a feel of what to expect from this WOD. After reading through the instructions, I had an idea of what to do so I would have to spend less time thinking during the actual coding portion. I did this for my previous WODs as well and I have found it to be a very effective strategy for tackling these problems.
During the actual WOD, I had a major setback that made me waste 5-6 minutes at the beginning. My server was not loading, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I just know that it worked after a long time. After that, I began coding and finished everything up to adding the subtotal, tax, and grand total portion of the table. The table I had did not look like the one in the example and I spent a lot of time trying to make it look better. At around the 30 minute mark, I realized that the WOD instructions allowed us to copy and paste his template for his table into our own code. However, I knew that fixing everything would take me a long time, so I ended up restarting my attempt.
Now that I knew what to do for the second attempt on the WOD, I was able to finish everything a lot faster. I managed to get my server running at a faster rate than my first attempt and I also coded everything slightly faster as well. I copy and pasted the table that Dr. Port used in his example and used the tips that he gave in the WOD instructions to change the values. By the time I finished changing the values for all the products, I was at around the 18 minute mark, which was significantly faster than the previous attempt. From this experience, I learned that I should read the instructions more carefully because they can provide useful hints if we’re stuck.