Going into this class, I knew very little about programming. My only experience with it was a crash course class that I was required to take in high school. Through that class, there was a lot of hand-holding and guidance in making sure we were going the right way before being thrown to the dogs and we had no clue on what we were doing. This class in that regard was formatted rather similarly. However, I think I am coming away from this class knowing just a little bit more of the basic programming skills and knowledge that I did not walk away with even last semester. How useful this may be in an IT context may depend on the job someone may take up. If they are simply taking on a tech support role or something similar, this class may not be very relevant to them and I believe I am in that group. I think I can say however that I do know some of the basic principles of programming and can expand upon it in the future if I need to. The hands-on experience of needing to look up reference material and coding examples will not be lost on me. Even then, many problems will not have very easy solutions or are easy to figure out. I think the perseverence gained in this class will be something that I take away moving on into the future. While I didn't really come away from this class working with a partner or many people for that matter, I can confidently say that the other people in this class also now know the pain of coding and I believe would be willing to collaborate on working on future projects. At the end of the day, confidence building is going to be the toughest. Many times in this class you have to say "I don't know" to a lot of things until you read up on them and actually typing them out. I think continual practice and learning will increase confidence for myself and potential future work mates.
What I learned from creating a professional portfolio is that coding is hard! Still hard! There are many principles and functions that are needed in "simple" code that it's a little ridiculous really. In terms of knowledge and expertise gained from WODs, it was the importance of reading up beforehand and then putting that knowledge and code down into Visual Studio as fast as possible. This put an emphasis on being quick and not wasting time on anything not needed or necessary. Overall, I thought that the quizzes did help to reinforce just a little bit some of the content that we would see in the next couple of class sessions. The labs were helpful in creating a jumping off point where we could expand upon what we learned in class to apply to the "on your own" sections and exercises. The essays overall were able to be used to reflect upon the work completed so far and maybe make some informed changes in discipline and ways of thinking moving forward. And finally, in Assignments 1 and 2, which applied a lot of the code from the Labs and WODs into practice, it just told me about the sheer amount of work and code that goes into building each website. Personally, it made me appreciate sites like SquareSpace that help out small businesses and YouTubers even more as it really simplifies the process for them to build a website easily and more importantly securely.
The most challenging part of the course for me was understanding the Bash and other command prompts that we needed to use in this class. Uploading to the Google Cloud was extremely frustrating, more difficult, and more time consuming to upload compared to the system that was used last semester. The other major challenge was simply understanding again all of the basic HTML and Node.js terms. Another additional challenge is again, getting the WODs down to a reasonable time worthy of submission. The only way to overcome most of these problems was to ask from help either from classmates or the professor. Otherwise, you were on your own and trying your best to research online any potential solutions. I believe I was more willing to reach out to classmates for some advice. I think the only achievement that I want to highlight from this class is passing it! I didn't last semester and that kind of sucked. I walked away not really understanding really much of what we did throughout the semester and am happy to say while I'm still a little confused on a lot of things, I am less so than at the end of last semester.
I think the first hurdle, the syntactic is the hardest hurdle. Especially for someone like me who is starting on square one knowing nothing. You're having to learn how VS code works, basic programming principles, what x does or what y doesn't do. It's a tough stage and I think it lastes probably through the end of February and into March. The algorithm step is a little bit better but not too much. This was more logic based and the time to pass this hurdle was much shorter. The final stage, application, I think actually was one of the easier hurdles. It simply is applying what was learned during the semester into a cohesive final project. The hands-on experience gained again increases my respect for the comapanies such as SquareSpace who are responsible for building websites everyday or small businesses and people. In terms of being able to handle IT issues, I'm honestly not too sure how some of the things learned in this class may be relevant, but again, the coding knowledge gained here is irreplacable and definitely may be applicable for certain jobs.
I think the obvious AI that we're talking about here is ChatGPT. This tool as many of us learned this semsester can be a blessing or a curse depending on what you ask it. For simple coding questions, such as with the WODs or simple questions on the Labs, it can answer them with ease and will usually be correct. However, with some of the complex questions that were asked in class and on the Labs, it gave an answer that was not 100% guaranteed to work without more research. At the very least, it did points me in the right direction many times and was used maybe as a source of inspiration.
It's difficult to say what specifically this class would have helped me on as I still don't know what type of job that I'm going to be applying for as of yet. However, the major takeaways from this class for me is learning how some of the basics of coding that may be useful in solving some simple backend stuff for a future company. This class I think also helped me learn where my device may be the problem or perhaps it may be the server or coding. Compatibility will continue to be important as older tech continues to age and will need to adapt to new changes in our technology. Not just in terms of age, but when rolling out products, there needs to be consideration for different operating systems as well that the website may not be viewed on just a computer. Therefore, the code needs to be changed in order to accomodate the different interactions users may have on different devices. Overall, this course was a good informative piece in my educational journey. Specifically in which I would like to distance myself from any coding related jobs possible. It's a little bit too much effort even though there is a small rewarding factor associated with it. I think I would rather stick to the side of either analytics or basic IT support in a company. Again also, this increased my perseverence in tackling problems. Many problems won't have an obvious answer and I will need to collaborate with others to find a solution.