E6: Evaluation Guidelines and Class Retrospective BLOG

23 May 2023

Briefly describe your system

My e-shop is “The Obsidian Market”, a take on the Dark Web “Black Markets” but with a fun Minecraft-themed spin. You can buy various “illegal” things (things that can usually only be had through mods) in your vanilla Minecraft world through The Obsidian Market! It can be mythical pets, weapons, or foods!

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

I am having trouble with orders in general subtracting from quantities available under the wrong conditions and pulling into the cart successfully. This causes issues for the whole site that make it not consistently process purchases.

Describe what you are most proud of about your system:

I enjoy the overall aesthetic I managed to create. It took a lot longer fiddling with the CSS than I wanted, but I hope it created a memorable UI if not a completely functional one.

Describe what you are least happy with your system:

I wish my site were fully functional. It still has certain issues that have persisted since Assignment1 because of conflicts from altering things between assignments.

How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2?

Cookies and sessions made certain things easier (like blocking access to certain pages), but other things more complicated. It’s not the most difficult concept but it was one I am still struggling with.

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

I would refer to other sources and even previous versions of my site (I ended making many copies). The professor, TAs, friends, ChatGPT, W3 schools and related sites were all invaluable help to me for all the assignments.

Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?

Cookies and sessions were alright to initially implement.

Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment?

Cookies and sessions became a bit of a struggle in the later parts because it changed the way I needed to approach my site functions, even if they techincally worked beforehand.

What did you learn from doing this assignment?

This assignment felt the most open with what you could do to achieve the requirments. My initial ideas for the cart were definitely different from how other students had coded their carts.

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

I would make sure I really understood all the code I implemented at each step. Assignments would often need altering between each one and going back only to not exactly remember what something does was a pain.

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

I would say 10% thinking, 35% writing and 55% testing. A and B would intermingle quite a bit becuase I could not progress on certain tasks without others working first. Testing was also where I would encounter my errors that took forever to figure out.

Assign an estimated percentage on the amount each team member contributed to the assignment (including yourself) and explain briefly your rationale for the percentage breakdown. Be sure to include an overview of what specifically you and your partners contributed (e.g. “I worked on the security and my partner 1 worked on personalization”)

I made my own website.