Insurance Program 1 | My First Personal Project in 2022

Over the Christmas holiday, I was not only occupied spending time with my relatives and playing games at night with friends. I was also learning more about different data structures in C++. I read and watched YouTube videos to learn more about vector arrays, maps, and single-linked lists(adding to the front, deleting from the front, clearing the list, and looping through the list). To create this project I also exercised my current knowledge about inheritance and object arrays.

Type of Project and what does it do...

This C++ console project allows users to create customers and give them different insurance policies. Users can then view any policy that belongs to a customer and renew a policy if he/she chooses. To "renew a policy" is simply a way for the customer to pay for the insurance that they own and the amount of payments is tracked for a given number of months.

My experience with the project...

During my time coding, I ran into numerous logic and runtime errors that I debugged. One of those errors involved  the attempt to access methods in an object array that contained different classes(info on how this was setup) but the compiler was only recognizing methods from the base class instead of derived classes. So I eventually found out that I needed to learn more about casting in C++ - specifically dynamic casting(Youtube video from The Cherno), and apply what I learned to the project.

All in all, I had fun coding and debugging it. There are still some recognizable bugs that were not handled but I will leave this for the second iteration of this project that I plan to re-build using Qt.

Want to see and test the code? Here it is on GitHub.

code from an "add policy" method

The below paragraphs were written at the start of the year and have been modified in this post

Furthermore...

I also researched other C++ endeavors like game development and mobile/desktop application development. My research led me to Qt, a cross-platform application development software that can also be used to make modern graphical user interfaces. Coincidentally, my university uses it also for the "GUI programming" course that I will take for this second semester. Therefore, I should be equipped with the skills to embark on version 2 of this insurance program; this time with a nice user interface and improvements on the code logic.