Assignment 1 was the first time that all the goals that this class strives for you to achieve all came together. This was my first hands-on experience in developing software applications for this course. This allowed me to gain confidencec in addressing coding errors and using the basic programming skills that I learned throughout the course all tieing into this assignment.
I looked at the WODs as extra practice on the coding concepts we discussed in class since most of the labs lined up with the WODs gave me a different perspective on how things can be coded differently but still have the same function. The quizzes were very impactful as they made sure I read all the readings for the Pre-lab. Finishing the readings and knowing the content ahead of time before the Lab was very important in completing and understanding the labs fully. I enjoyed the format of the labs as they are essentially assignments that we go through as a class together. Without the walk-through from the professor, I would see these labs to be very difficult but since we would do most of the problems in class the workload wasn’t too heavy. The essays were a good change of pace where you could reflect on the work that you have done throughout the course. Assignments 1 and 2 were a lot more complex. Taking everything you learned in the course and applying it to a real-life web application was the hardest part of the class. However, it gave me key coding problem-solving skills in debugging all the code to ensure the application would run smoothly.
A challenge I came across happened to be in Assignment 1 where I was tasked to display any input errors the user made and display it on the page. I was struggling with my code as it was not doing what I was looking for so I asked the resources around me for help. These were some of my classmates and TAs who gave me suggestions on how to debug my code. Finishing up and submitting assignment 1 was a clear achievement as I spent countless hours on the project, giving me that sense of accomplishment when it was all said and done.
The hands-on experience in general in developing a working web application was very insightful. As I said earlier these assignments took everything we learned from this course and applied it to this assignment. As creating a web page may be something I do in the future it was very important in understanding what I’m doing and how it gets implemented on my website. Using the syntactic, algorithmic, and application aspects we learned in the class made the assignments much more engaging as you are just applying it to a real web application now.
For ChatGPT I quickly noticed that for most of the problems in the class, you would have to give the AI immense background information of the assignment so it can correctly solve your problem. Since it doesn’t go into much detail it was hard for the code that AI outputted to be useful in the assignment you were looking for. So instead I would use a service like ChatGPT just for idea generation for the problem I needed solving. Instead of having the AI output straight code to solve the problem asking for ways to work around the problem and look at it in a different way was the most beneficial for me.
In terms of career having an understanding of website development and Javascript will go a long way in my career field. Being in MIS means I will need an understanding of functions and coding. This class has adequately prepared me to understand and debug MIS problems that I may face in my future job. Knowing the syntactic, algorithmic, and application of javascript will give me that edge over other candidates looking for the same job position.