Wow! Time flies by fast! I am almost halfway done with the quarter but it feels like it has just begun.

I have been enjoying working on my capstone project. While working on this project, I have come to understand my likes and dislikes. A year ago, I thought I enjoyed working on the front-end side of an application. However, this project changed my perspective and I discovered I prefer working in back-end.

To me, working on the front-end side of the project is frustrating. Although I consider myself to be a visual person because I like to see the fruit’s of my labor, I do not have an eye for designing a webpage. Therefore, I prefer working in back-end. One of the pros of back-end is its more stable ecosystem. I am less likely to be required to keep up with the latest framework. In addition, I don’t have to test my code on several browsers.

Progress for Capstone

For my capstone project, I have completed two sprints since my last blog post. The first sprint consisted of creating accounts (regular user and admin) and login. I have never created a login and register page before so it was a learning experience. I learned how to encrypt a string using the SHA-1 function. SHA1 stands for secure hash algorithm. It produces a 160-bit checksum for a user inputted string.

The second sprint consisted of editing/updating the user profile. One of the challenges I faced during this sprint was how to prevent users from changing the password if they only want to change their user profile information, such as first name, last name, or email. The solution I came up with was to have a toggle switch. When the user toggles the switch for Change Password, a form to change the password will appear. This is very user friendly. I also learned how to implement this using jQuery.