Which technology had the most difficult learning curve? Easiest?

The second stage of Senior Capstone was very interesting, and I have learned a lot of cool new things. I had some struggles and successes, but I am learning a lot from my experiences. This quarter, my team is working on developing a Dating App for Animal Adoption website that showcases available and pending pets that are looking for a forever home. To make a website for this purpose, it requires a lot of planning and work from each of the team members.

My task for this implementation stage was to work on the search bar and the filtering functionality. I had never implemented a search bar nor a filter menu prior to this course so I first had to do some research. While building a search bar and a filter menu was the easiest task to do, it was retrieving the animals from the database that was the most challenging. Designing the search bar and the filter menu was the easiest because it involved mostly HTML and CSS code which I have prior experience. On the other hand, retrieving animals from the database was the trickiest. This required me to use JavaScript (JS) and JS is not the easiest language to learn. JS has a steep learning curve due to syntax and implementations. I initially had to use my teammate’s implementation of setting up the database for the Pets page and go from there. I also had to do a lot of testing with different built-in libraries to ensure that I was receiving all the information regarding the animals in the database. Originally, I did not get the correct response from the database, but it turned out that I wasn’t calling the correct attributes. This led me to research our team’s database system on Google’s Firestore to investigate what attributes were being used to hold information regarding the animals. From there, I was able to code using the correct attributes and my code eventually received the correct information. It turned out that it didn’t require much code to search for animals and once I was able to get it to work, I now have a better idea on how the search bar works.

The next challenging task that I had to do was to implement the filter menu. The filter menu allows users to narrow their search results down to their preference. Before I implemented this functionality, I did some thinking and I realized that the code may be like the search bar functionality that I implemented for this class. The filter menu is basically an extension to the search bar functionality. I learned that this involved using arrays to search through the database and determine whether the animal meets the criteria regarding the user’s requests. Using arrays was the most challenging part of my implementation for this class as it initially conflicted with the search bar results. I was later able to figure out how to code the filter menu to work only if the user input a search query. In the end, the working filter functionality basically is an extension to the search bar, and I am very proud of my learning experience. I can now say that I am comfortable with the implementation of a search bar and a filter menu using JS. I look forward to using this in my future projects!