Assignment 15

     Over the course of the semester I ran into a few things that I’ve previously worked on, and quite a few things that were new to me. JavaScript is generally not my preferred web development language, and I had to adjust accordingly to that. From Assignment 1 forward I saw a lot of worth in what the class entailed. I was to create an online portfolio of works which I could potentially share with an employer and get in the mindset of doing so. I struggled with the Mobile Website Assignment, and Assignment 11 the program advisor. There is a lot of back and forth about what the right way to do a mobile website is, and documentation is all over the place in that regard. The program advisor was difficult in first finding a program that met the criteria of the assignment (or) as many of the degree programs didn’t have either or prerequisites. Also, it wasn’t required but I wanted the advisor to accurately reflect the degree plan so adding in a lot of other functionality was difficult to me. Getting the ability to select 4 electives and ensuring that once prerequisites were met that undesirable disabling/enabling didn’t occur when selecting or unselecting courses. Assignment 12’s research into CMS seems to be extremely relevant to the industry as many job postings expressed a desire for that experience.

     The Final Project was good as it got me to consider and work within WordPress, which there are lots of jobs in the industry. The final also exposed us to team development and communicating to effectively deliver a result. I had only played around with WordPress for personal use and tested out some of the power of the addons, but this class gave me a goal and got to see and use it for a specific purpose. Finding a client was proving difficult, so I am glad that we were given the opportunity to do the class page. I found some overlap between my work and other project members’ development

     Developer jobs in my area all required the very specific skillset that we focused on in the class; CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. Also mentioned in a lot of the job postings was PHP and MySQL experience along with Bootstrap. I was more familiar with these than I was proficient in jQuery, so that in conjunction with what I’ve learned in the class would propel me as a candidate if I were to pursue a web development career. I am going into Information Assurance/ Cybersecurity so this doesn’t directly translate into my job scope or requirements, however in learning programming I can determine vulnerabilities in my own code that could present an issue later in the future making the company/website susceptible to such attacks.

     Overall, I believe that this class honed skills I had previously utilized and expanded them. Some of the major challenges I found in this class were using the professor’s existing code in a manner that was consistent with my coding style. Also, methods I would use in PHP did not translate into JavaScript so I had to find new ways of doing things. This was a good learning experience and showed me some of the strengths of JavaScript object oriented programming that I wasn’t aware of previously. That type of problem solving is only going to help me in my future career. This class also exposed us to a bunch of other people’s approach to the same problem which gave multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing. It was great to see other people’s interpretation of the various assignments and see how they utilized the same concepts to accomplish different results.