With assignment 1 submitted, now is the time to look back and reflect on my work.
After spending countless hours on this project, I feel like my programming skills have greatly improved in the following ways: I am now able to code a little faster since I have a better understanding of what I’m doing. I am also having an easier time looking at code and knowing what it does in relation to all the other code in the file. By knowing what the code is doing, I am have a slightly easier time knowing where my problems are coming from when something isn’t working.
However, with that said, I also have several things I need to improve on. I need to be able to understand what to do when I am starting from scratch. Often times I will be lost on what to do and have to ask for help for a headstart. On top of that, I feel as if I often write too many lines of code without stopping to see if it actually works, which causes me to spend more time than I should for troubleshooting.
Besides all the work spent on Assignment 1, now is the time to reflect my overall time in this class so far.
The WODs have been a great resource for this class and have helped me become a better programmer. I think I have only had to look back on the screencasts for 2 or 3 of them. However, sometimes the WODs have very tricky instructions that can cause you to spend more time trying to understand what it’s saying. I completely skipped the Invoice3 WOD because I had a hard time understanding what it was trying to say. Other than that, I really enjoyed doing these assignments.
As for the labs, they were also very informative and important to my success for this class. Professor Port explains everything in a lot of detail so often times I won’t need to ask him an questions. However, I feel like the labs have the same problems as the WODs in terms of explaining the instructions. They also aren’t consistent sometimes (Ex. the lab #’s don’t match or some of the instructions are also outdated). I feel like the class could really improve if the instructions were clear and concise. Besides from that, I learned the most from these labs as I got to get hands on practice with coding.
With all this in mind, I am around 80% confident in being able to do Assignment2 with minimal help from outside sources. Hopefully the upcoming labs and screencasts will boost it to 100%