Briefly describe your system (e.g. A store selling Pokemon game cards) My store was inspired by mom, since I wanted to help her out with creating an ecommerece website. She has been selling lucky charm jewelery since the Pandemic happened, so I just wanted to create a cute little show for her. Obviously I knew it wasn’t going to be able to be used for actual business, but it was fun trying to bring it to life in the digital world.
Any notable shortcomings, bugs, problems, or additional features not implemented? Everything… was not able to get pass the sessions part of the Assignment unfortunatley. I knew I had some deep shortcomings for Assignment #3, but I kind of draw the line where I sacrifice a nights worth and I still don’t understand the material. It might just be my way of learning or I personally don’t have a particular taste for the topic of technology or maybe me and technology only vibe together when I use it for entertainment purposes. I definetley felt like I could have done a lot better for the class overall. I have a really good work ethic and am able to push through any class, but I feel like I really rely on social interactions and this semester in particular took a reall big toll on my mental well-being.
Describe what you are most proud of about your system: My design. If I had more time I would have wanted to tailor it more of a more aesthetic look, but I really like the way I was able to use bits and piece of template code and was able to adapt it to the codes we were suppose to use. I like my navbar. I think it looks nice too. I worked hard on it, even though it doesn’t look like it.
Describe what you are least happy with your system: Funtionality. When you go through my website you’ll see that it does not work, unfornately. Believe or not, I did spend an enormous amount of time for this project, I even started two weeks ahead of time, but of course again, I don’t think I’m fit to be a MIS person. I understand what the codes were used for and what functionalities I needed for the project, the ability to put the nuts and bolts of things together to create a working thing was what tripped me up the most. It honestly made me hate programming and anything Information Technology, at some points I had a phase where I didn’t even want to go on the internet because the look of a website reminded me of the stress I went under trying to make my ecommerce site work. Overall, I hated my final outcome of my project, and I honestly put most of the blame on me. Again, I do beleive I could have tried harder and that since everything is online, I struggled a lot.
How was developing this assignment different than assignment #2? A lot of planning and thinking and also know how everything works together. Like gears on a machine, you won’t be able to get the whole thing running if one of the gears aren’t moving. I guess since my study habits were kind of off this semester, I was literate in somethings and iliterate on other things, which created my greates short comings for Assignment 3. I did plan out my Assignment 3 and even annotated the actual Assignment description to get a better picture of what is expected, but again, if you don’t understand the material, it just won’t work. It’s not like the other classes where you can BS your way through it.
When you ran into a problem, what did you do to address it?
I ran into many problems, and I had an established SOS plan when I did. First I would look at past labs to see if we did something similiar to what was asked for. Then I would watch past screen casts and try to study the way the code was used. Then I would look at past students codes to see if they had something that produced something that was simliar of what I needed to produce, then I would look at what my other peers did, and almost rarely would I look on the internet , because these IT people on the internet are too advanced and the way they explain things is not how you would teach someone who was learning coding for the first time and made me more confuse and fuse my growing hadred towards IT. Then finally, when I have used all my resources, I would schedule an appointment with Professor Port.
Describe what worked well in doing this assignment?
That each Assignment was able to build upon eachother. We weren’t just thrown into the deep end and asked to make a fully functioning ecommerce website, but it actually took it by doable chunks where we were not overhwhelmed with the tasks. Also, having some parts of the lab go over something similiar and act as an examples helped a lot.
Also I like the fact that it actually gives us hands on expereince of what a programmer does. I am a huge advocate for good leadership, and I believe that a great leader is able to empathisize with their team members and the hard work that they do. This is such a good way as a MIS person to see just what types of stress that IT people go through and not always demand so much from them or demand anything unreasonable.
Describe what did not work well in doing this assignment? I noticed for the Assignments we did not finish Labs or lessons in time for us to actually do the Assignments. Although Professor did give us plenty of time to start on the Assignments and actually work on it.Everything we needed to put the actual Assignment together and have it functioning the way it was expected was not given to us (in my opinion) until the weekend before it was due. I would have then had to spend my whole weeked trying to put everything together and rewatching screencasts and getting help from Professor Port all in the final four days it was due. Also, what was even more frustruating was actually testing it out, which of itself, takes a bit of a while and, again, in my opinion, takes a couple of days to do so. I was mainly frustrated for Assignment 1 since after we turned it in, we learned how to have an actual server running, and this caused me a big shortfall for the first Assignment since mistakes then became more evident the more delved into the Assignment more.
What did you learn from doing this assignment? That I’m switching my majors and MIS is not for me. Even if programming is not the whole basis of a career for MIS, I would have been dealing with highly intelligent individuals. And the fact that I’m not even able to understand their language (programming) makes me think of what even makes me qualified to lead a team in a tech sector. Of course, this is not ever going to deter me away from working with a tech company. Working with an IT team is inevitable since technology is basically integrated with everything we do and will continue to grow and change. I just don’t think I can learn about managing IT in an educational setting is for me. I rather learn it in the real world and through actual hands on expereince and where the anxiety of getting a good grade is not tied to the expereince.This assignment also taught me to appreciates websites more and respect IT people more. Their job is hard and props to them of being able to learn and understand these stuff.
If you could go back in time and do things differently, what would you change? My attitude. I came from a community college and our ICS class was smooth sailing so I thought I wasn’t going to have to put so much work into it. I also would have prioritize learning the material more since it was something I was not familiar with. I only focus on lessons I liked. For example, the designing part I really liked, I hated algorithms because my head could not wrap around the rules and concepts of algorithms.
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 thought about how to do something maybe 10% of the time I worked on Assignment 1. But as Assignment 3 came around, I think I spent about 40% of my time planning things out. The sample powerpoint was a really good exammple. Actually writing the code took me about majority of my time and I think the most tedious time consuming spent was actually testing and debugging it and finding out what was wrong with it. I wished we had a formal class time talking about debugging our assignment. That wouldve been helpful for Assignemnt 3 since there was a lot of underlying functionalities we couldn’t see right on the website.
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”)
100% me. If this was inperson, I would have honestly made a big study group and collaborated with everyone. I tend to do that in my more difficult classes. I just think its weird meeting over zoom and really unproductive.