My whole week was occupied with me working on the layout and the design of the registration form. In the previous week, I did not focus on the whole design aspect of the form first, so when I showed Dr Shawn my progress on the project in the first day of the week, he was not impressed by its looks. He gave me a few suggestions on how to improve the structure and make it a bit more visually appealing, like putting each fields in a table, organizing in terms of category and age group, numbering of each participant form, etc. It was a good learning experience about designing user interfaces as some of his suggestions were things I would never have thought of before.
So I did all that and it definitely made the form itself look a lot better. However, when I showed the form to Dr Shawn for the second time, he pointed out some things could be a potential issue for the user, such as inputting of time duration. Initially, it was just a simple line edit with some placeholder text and an input mask, but its not very indicative of what the user should fill in. He showed me a widget from Wt that already deals with time entry alone, and then questioned me why I did I not used it in the first place. He then goes on to emphasize the importance of being well familiar with the tools you are working with. In my case, the Wt framework is part of my tool set, and it is vital to know it inside and out, as it really is a very powerful framework that enables you to build complex web applications, all in C++. After hearing that, I made the necessary changes. Here is a sneak peek of what the form looks like at this time:
My learning for this week doesn’t stop there. I could have saved so much time working on the project if it wasn’t for my own wrongdoings. Basically,I have a bad habit of hard coding in some parts of the program. As I go back to these parts and make amendments, I ran into a lot of troubles, which I have not discovered earlier. This made me spent a considerable amount of time figuring out the problem, when I could have avoided it in the first place. I didn’t know how bad it was until it occurred to me. I learned it the hard way.
This comes to show that I still have a long way ahead before even being considered a good software developer. I do hope that I learn from these trials and tribulations to help me become a better version of myself in the long run.
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