10/10 Self Evaluation

When I put together the project proposal I had no idea what I was in for, but I did want a challenge, particularly on the programming side of things. Once the proposal was handed in and accepted the research and design begun. After designing the system and starting on some implementation, particularly programming object oriented in C Shap.NET, I realised how much of a challenge the programming was going to be. After getting some syntax help from a friend however my pace of progress picked up.

After I gained confidence in programming the project went smoothly until it was time to create the mapping algorithm. This held me up for a while, but once I found an algorithm for calculating distances and a simple bubble sort all that was left was the sorting of client locations. This in itself took a long time, as well as a lot of trouble shooting and testing.

These two main challenges have left me with much more confidence in my problem solving skills and programming skill, which is what I had hoped for.

I have never before done anything with online mapping, or using an API to integrate maps. I found this area fascinating, especially the potential of what can be done in the future with traffic information. Using a mapping service and implementing an interface with a web service backend really gave me an idea of how you can re-use code and functionality across platforms and benefit from it.

The project as a whole took much longer than planned. I believe that this is because I underestimated how long the majority of tasks would take, and how hard certain tasks would be. This was particularly true with the mapping part which ended up being much more complex than originally thought. The extra time spent ensuring that this process was as good as I could make it was worth it, and in the end works just how I want it to. I learnt that even if you make a project scope right at the beginning and make time frames for tasks a project can take much longer than planned

There are many more improvements that I would make to the system if I had a larger amount of time, but I am perfectly happy just how it is now as a proof of concept as it does what got done what I set out to do.