This assignment focused a lot more on server-side processing than the previous one for my E-commerce store. The first assignment was more of setting everything up and this assignment was more of making everything connect to each other. I learned a lot from this assignment, mainly through office hours with Professor Port. He was able to explain the relations between the server and the different files that I had. Although my assignment isn’t 100% complete, I was able to do most of it while understanding what was going on at the same time.
I chose to not work with a partner for this assignment because I wanted to learn how to program this store on my own. I was able to get a lot of help although it was not always at the best times due to my professor’s busy schedule. I needed a lot of help understanding how to connect post operations to the server through the buttons on my website. I would say roughly 20% of my time was spent brainstorming on what to do, 20% was spent writing code, and 60% of my time was spent debugging. I did not listen to Port’s advice in writing code in small increments at a time and that really screwed me over.
What worked well was my brainstorming. Normally the plans that I had for executing my code were correct, it was just a matter of knowing how to implement it into something the computer could understand. Everytime I went to office hours, I told the professor what I was trying to do and he was able to help me translate that into actual code. However, other than that, I was struggling a lot with implementation. Next time, I think I will ask for help earlier. I ran out of time for assignment 2 and couldn’t get all the help that I needed.