It has been a journey working on our Animal Dating App project (Furever Friend Finder). It started with me having never worked with Flask before to becoming comfortable with it.

We are almost at the end of the semester. One of the things I have learned from working on this project is working on accounts and login. I wasn’t familiar with password encryption so I had to learn an encryption function MySQL uses. One of the encryption function MySQL uses is SHA1(). What it does is that when the user creates a Password, the function will encrypt the password string using the SHA-1 technique. SHA1 stands for secure hash algorithm. It calculates a 160-bit checksum for a password string.

I also learned new MySQL queries and functions. For example, I learned the GROUP_CONCAT() function. It’s a function that returns a concatenated string. This was especially useful when I had to concatenate values from check-mark boxes. We had three dispositions the user can select when creating their pet’s profile. I used the GROUP_CONCAT() function to display the selected dispositions to a table. Some of the new queries I also learned was chaining SELECT statements as well.

For the “pictures can rotate through a series of images” functionality, I tried to implement a nested Bootstrap carousel for Browsing Profiles. However, I later discovered Bootstrap does not support this functionality as stated in their documentation.

Overall, I am grateful for this opportunity because I have learned a tremendous amount. This project helped me to be a better programmer. I have improved both my front-end and back-end skills. I hope to take the skills I have gained from working on this project to my job. I have a full-stack position lined up next year, which I am excited to start!