Overall semester reflection (Wk 13)

With the semester drawing to a close, and the only piece of assessment left for DECO1800 being the personal portfolio, I thought it would be useful to take a look back on the semester and reflect on the assessment items and classes to see what I have learned and what skills I improved. By looking back to my first blog entry for the semester, regarding my course aims and expectations I can see that I was able to fulfil many of the tasks I had initially laid out for myself. 

 At the start of the course I believed I would be able to improve my web design skills by learning new things and I definitely think I achieved this. The workshops proved instrumental to this - working through examples to learn about AJAX calls and PHP global elements were just two examples that I specifically remember. Not only the workshops, the lectures helped me better myself in this area - Matt shared a great deal of knowledge on topics like decomposition and modularity. Whilst I may have not gotten to apply his teachings directly, I feel like learning about them definitely broadened my thinking scope when it comes to web design.

 In the first blog post I mentioned that I was worried that I would not be able to contribute evenly in the project due to my struggles in using the JavaScript language. Looking back at Part B and C of the project specifically where I was responsible for coding the Flickr and some of the Twitter API sections, I now feel as that I was able to put my worries to rest. In my opinion, I was able to fairly contribute to my team in this regard. The help I received from both course and external resources definitely helped me to complete my sections and I believe that I know more about JS from my experiences.

 Overall I feel like I have learnt a lot this semester and I am very grateful to my tutors and group members who helped me along the way. The course really conveyed to me the importance of working with others and getting help when you need it - not just to get tasks done but to learn about how to solely do them in the future. I have enjoyed DECO1800 as a course and I hope that the knowledge I have learnt can be applied in the future.

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