Learning Experience
Things that I learned doing this project that I either didn't know before, or had limited experience with, include setting up the LAMP stack, using the Simpletest plugin for Eclipse, using Eclipse for php, and utilizing my fellow students as a resource. I'll not go into the first three here, as I have already extensively blogged on those subjects, but using other students' blogs as a learning tool deserves a little attention.
For the first two or three programming classes that we take here at the college, students are given any number of dire warnings about collaboration on programs or using google to find code examples. And for those courses that approach makes sense. I mean, we are trying to learn Computer Science here. So being given the opportunity in this class to openly use classmates as a resource was a little weird at first. Every time I went through someone else's posts for inspiration I felt like I was cheating! I quickly got over this feeling when I realized that this is probably the way people program in the real world. Open collaboration means that if you are hitting a wall on a problem, chances are someone else on the project has either seen this problem before and solved it or has some helpful input. It is all about getting the project done efficiently and on time. So, thanks for the help everybody! Hopefully a few of my posts helped someone out as well.
Bringing it all together
This project really helped with my understanding of a few key concepts. Those concepts are debugging, refactoring, and unit testing. All three of these ideas are vital in constructing robust and useful software, and represent a good portion of the actual work that I put into Homebase.
That was basically my presentation and accurately represents my experience working with this project. It also gave me the opportunity to incorporate a picture of Grimace eating a small child...behold!!
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