10 weeks have already passed, and I feel like I just started yesterday! It has truly been a great experience working with the team here and learning valuable skills in web development.

This past week mostly consisted of debugging and making sure my project fits the proper requirements. I was able to finish the functional acknowledgement section which tells our clients about any errors that their EDI documents contain when they send them to us. There were some issues with my database tables I had to fix as well as some front-end work in displaying data on the page. I was able to work out most of the issues with the help of my teammates to get a functional version of the project up and running.

One thing I learned this week is that debugging definitely takes a great amount of patience since it is mostly a trial and error process of repeated testing of different parts of your application. This is a part of development that I want to get stronger at by doing unit tests and utilizing TDD (test driven development). Debugging is usually the least enjoyable part of a developers job, but it is absolutely necessary and can be a valuable learning experience since you pick up so many small details along the way. For example, when I was working on my view, I was loading another template via an AJAX request that appends HTML to the page. When my JQuery event handler wasn’t working for this new HTML, I figured out that event handlers work differently with dynamically loaded content, so I had to use a different way to get the feature to work. These little tidbits may seem insignificant at first, but learning from these mistakes allows you to avoid them in the future and fix issues faster when something goes wrong.

Since the project is close to completion, I will mostly be focusing on making the UI look a little nicer, making sure all of the business rules are accounted for, and possibly refactoring some code if I can find ways to make it run better. I will give myself a rating of 4 this week as I get ready to start fresh again next week.