Overview

You won’t be-able to see the progress that I have done last week, but it has been lots. Last week, I said that only a few things needed changing, but I have since added more features and making the UI better. I haven’t committed the code (as of writing) because it didn’t feel done, but now it does feel good and something worthy of an assignment. I think I may have spent more time than necessary actually doing the assignment (considering the requirements) but I like how it works.

What was completed

The last feature that I have (and will) implement is likes. It seems basic but I spent some time on it and tried to make it as useful as possible. I made it show top liked collections in the collections page and other pages (like user, see what they have liked). This also meant that I had to implement the ability to have that shown (part of my new UI changes). Something that I spent a few tries was how to implement that API, should I use one url (toggle on POST request, use form body or use DELETE for unlike) or have 2 separate (like and unlike). I ultimately chose the latter because it made more sense as it easily shows what is happening in the url. I made sure to show it on the collection page and I am happy so far with its implementation.

The other thing that I did was to fix code by adding comments. This was beneficial because it allowed me to try and understand my code (and fix if needed), but also make the code similar (I had many ways of doing the same thing). I also had implemented ways to remove code duplication. I had a very similar template for the collections and items page, so I made it the same template and used the template options for specify what is shown (updating the UI doesn’t have to be done in 2 or more now).

Something that I realised that I needed to still do was make methods to get default data. In this case it was getting the top 100 movies, books and songs. I have already done code to do that for my last assignment, but I felt that I needed to get the top 100 not just random. This meant that I needed to actually do something, and I am proud of the results of my data (way faster than manually inputting data - even if it requires data scraping).

With all the testing that I had done (and some from peers), I had found bugs and have fixed them. Some of them are edge cases and others made me a bit annoyed to find (because I thought it worked). Overall, I like the help from peers and the outcome of my many hours of work. In case you forgot, my website is basically just a place where people can create collections of items and other people can comment on that collection. It is called “reviews” because I originally wanted to add a review attribute but haven't done it yet (could do it later).

Reflection

How did you help others/ how did they help you?

My peers were very helpful this term and past week. They have been useful to ask questions even when not expecting a response because sometimes just talking out loud can give ideas. It has been good where I show my website to them and ask for feedback (most of the time they say it is good). I also returned the favor by also listening to them even when I had no idea on what they were doing. Sometimes I could help because they were using Python, but other times I helped by simply listening to them (and them figuring the issues out themself).

With more time, how would you further improve the website?

With more time I could further improve my website in many ways. The first and main thing that I would do is make the website more useful. This can be more item types or reactions (extending the comments feature). I also would make some of the buttons actually work, specifically the report ones. Currently, the user/collection report (and item request/report issue) doesn’t do anything, and I would change that. However, a thing that I would enjoy the end product of (but maybe not the actually implementing) is a consistent UI because it is kind of different for some parts.

Looking back at the last few weeks, how would you rate yourself?

Well, in the presentation I have to rate myself according to the rubric which I feel that I satisfy the requirements. But just in general I wish that I started earlier and had done small amounts each day. This is because of the number of things that I have actually done in the few days leading up to now and could have been less if better time management (which isn’t to say it is bad, just needs improvement). But otherwise, I would say the result is what I imagined at the start of the term (when assignment got handed out) and possibly better in some ways.