Lab 9
Jillian Howarth
April 29, 2017

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1. What is this purpose of this Git repository? (duh!)

    The purpose of this Git Repository is hold my COMP 20 labs and projects.
   

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2. What was your favorite lab or assignment and why?

    - My favorite assignment was Assignment 3. I I enjoyed setting up and 
    accessing the MongoDB server and also felt it brought everything else 
    in the course together. After completing Assignment 3, I finally 
    understood all the different pieces of Assignment 2 and felt like 
    I understood web programming enough to be able to build a full web 
    application. 
    
    - It also helped my final project group move forward with the 
    back-end/database part of our project.
   

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3. How much do you think you have grown from day 1 of this course to now?

    - When I began the course, I had previously used HTML and CSS but did 
    not know how the web works, JavaScript, how to use a server, how to 
    connect to a database, web security, etc. In addition to learning these 
    topics, I think I learned how to think about the web. Now when I look 
    at web pages, I can think about things like security and actually 
    understand what is happening.
   
    - I also learned how to work and compromise with other people during 
    the group project. In particular, we struggled to compromise on 
    functionality and our implementation priorities and had to learn to 
    work through that. I learned a lot about communication and dealing 
    with group members who don't participate as well during this project.
   

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4. What was the most important thing that you learned in this course? Cite two examples as evidence.

    - I think the most important thing I learned during this project was how 
    to work on Computer Science projects with other people. Of course I also 
    learned web programming, but that is something I could have learned on 
    my own from the Internet, whereas it's difficult to create a long-term 
    project environment to practice working with other people. 
   
    - Before this course, I had never written code with another person. 
    During the semester group project, I've learned both how to write code 
    that is can easily be understood and modified by other people as well 
    as how to read other peoples' code and continue from where they left 
    off. A specific case of where this happened is one of my teammates 
    created the basic HTML, CSS, and JS files for several pages, but I needed 
    to add in a pop-up box with the instructions for our game. This involved 
    modifying existing JS code and add JS template scripts to the HTML file 
    without duplicating or overwriting the existing code. 
   
    - I've also learned quite a lot about communication during this group 
    project. Two of my group members are super communicative (and also close 
    friends) so planning times to meet with them and getting responses to 
    messages wasn't a problem. The two other members of my group are far less 
    communicative and we struggled to get them to attend meetings or respond 
    to our messages. One of the big things I took away from this is that 
    people have different communication styles and preferences. One of the 
    teammates who wouldn't attend meetings or respond to messages about meeting 
    up, but would respond almost immediately if we were talking about the actual 
    web application or code. Additionally, he always did he work consistently well 
    and on time, so I learned to step back and check in with him less. We really 
    were not able to get the other group member to be engaged so we learned it 
    was best to stop catering to him and constantly bugging him/asking for his 
    opinion and rather that it worked better to let him come to us and chime in 
    when he had something to contribute. 
   

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5. Now that you have finished the course, what topic would you like to delve deeper into?

    - While JavaScript is a frustrating and inconsistent language (that 
    caused me plenty of problems during the course), it seems to have a lot 
    of capabilities and I would like to explore that more. In particular, I 
    would like to explore interaction options and animations to make web 
    applications more engaging for the user (particularly with the speed and 
    shape of transitions between objects and web pages as the cursor moves, 
    scrolls, hovers, and clicks).