SNHU CS-210
Summarize the project and what problem it was solving.
This project was meant to illustrate principles of programming in relation to utilizing multiple languages, organization of vectors of data, and reading/writing data to files. The program itself manages a tabular database of animals and data associated with them - tracking number, name, type, subtype, how many eggs they have (if any) and if they are nursing.
What did you do particularly well?
I think my strength in this project was coding the interactions between menus and the storage of information. I covered most cases of user error, and found a way to store/retrieve data that doesn't depend on perfectly sized records (i.e. only 15 characters for names - retrieval process can still work through this).
Where could you enhance your code? How would these improvements make your code more efficient, secure, and so on?
I could definitely work on the error handling a lot more. I didn't cover as many error cases as I would have liked. This improvement would make the code more secure and less prone to errors, and enhance the storage and validity of data.
Did you find writing any piece of this code challenging, and how did you overcome this? What tools and/or resources are you adding to your support network?
The part that I found most challenging was working with a piece of code that wasn't mine. The Java code did not work 100% as described, but for this project we weren't supposed to modify it. This led to me implementing extra code to handle errors generated by the Java code - mainly data storage out of the scope of the original project. For example, project instructions designated names to only be 15 characters, but the Java code would save 16; in my own code, I limited names to 15 characters, but I had to figure out how to read between the two lengths without restricting my code to reading a static number of characters.
What skills from this project will be particularly transferable to other projects and/or course work?
I think code management and implementation of other people's code is the most useful skills I gained from this project.
How did you make this program maintainable, readable, and adaptable?
I adhered to the standards provided by the example Company, ensured I used whitespace and commenting effectively, and attempted to make my code as dynamic as possible to ensure future changes wouldn't be too difficult to implement.