Reflection

Keep trying and learning. At the very beginning, I planned to make the ShoppingHelper a SMS bot. Then, I was trapped in the logic of the workflow and querying data from the database. Using the 'session' function is challenging for me. When something is wrong, I do not know what happened to 'session'. I have to keep trying and finding ways to solve the problem. Although I did not successfully put it on SMS, the whole 'trying and learning' process teaches me a lot of things since I found many useful resources and tutorials that helped me a lot when I build it on Slack.

A bot is not just a bot. Before doing this project, my backend programming experience is zero. At that time, I thought that programming a bot is just set some triggers and related responses. However, through this project, I now know that a bot should have personality and programming a bot needs a systematic process. Otherwise, it is very easy to get trapped in the complicated process and the bot is not user-friendly at all.

Thank you, Professor Byrne. Although this project challenged me really hard, it made me pushing myself really hard and gave me a lot of confidence in facing programming challenges in the future.