As my experience with ICS 314 comes to an end, I believe that it is only right to reflect on what I have learned and the knowledge that I have gained along the way. In terms of software engineering, the course gives you a solid foundation to further your software developing career. I feel like the skills and the material that I have learned in this class will still be relevant to me way after I have finished the class, and I cannot say that about many of the other classes that I have taken in the past. There are many fundamental concepts in software engineering that was brought up in this class that go beyond the scope of just web development, and I believe that all software engineers should be familiar with these concepts.
One concept of software engineering that we learned about was functional programming. As someone who is still a beginner in programming, I was surprised to see how elegant and easy it is to write functional programs. It makes programming much more efficient by writing less lines of code to do a certain function. In this class we used the underscore library with Javascript to do simple functions, and sometimes not so simple functions, to get the desired results. Why would anyone want to write a for loop like this:
for (i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
var value = array[i];
for (j = 0; j < value.stuff.length; j++) {
doWorkOn(value.suff[j]);
}
}
When you could be using the underscore library to write code like this:
_.each(array, doWorkOn);
Both pieces of code have the same function, but as you can see, the underscore version is much cleaner, shorter, and simpler to write.
There is no doubt that functional programming is much more effective than your traditional way of programming, but functional programming is much more than just writing the code. When you code with functional programming it allows you to think of different solutions to problems that you didn’t think was possible. As programming progresses and as different demands arise, functional programming will always be there to add new functions that take on these demands.
As I progressed in this class and started to work with others rather than individually, I know much more about how coding standards are important. First of all, what are coding standards? Coding standards are sets of rules and procedures that can be specified on different programming languages or development environments. Now when it comes to coding standards, the question that I have asked myself a handful of times is “are coding standards really necessary?” Of course I want the code that I write to be pretty and uniform as possible, but is it possible for coding standards to have a greater function rather than just making your code look good? I for one think it does.
Coding standards are much more important when working within a group. It helps keep everything and check and code looking uniform. Every programmer has a certain style or way that they like to program, and coding standards allow programmers to know how things should be styled. Without coding standards, I feel like coding in a group would be much more difficult. There may be times where you don’t understand how a certain piece of code was written, but with coding standards you would know exactly how everything should be because you are coding under the same set of coding standards.
Coding standards aren’t designed to stop you from programming a certain way. Coding standards only help you become a better programmer by guiding you through your mistakes. If every programmer used them now, there will be much less headache in the future when you have to go back and update your code.
How do you work well with other people? Throughout the semester, I have been working by myself on programming and software development. It wasn’t until we started to work on the final project was when we started to work with a group of people. Project management is important because it goes beyond the scope of software engineering. There are going to be many times where you are put into situations where you have to work as a team, and finding the optimal ways to work together as a cohesive unit is something that everyone should know.
As we started to work on our final projects, I think the most important part was finding time to meet outside of class. It is always better to discuss about issues, problems, and updates in person rather than communicating online. I think that is the most important part about project management. My group was lucky enough to have timeslots where all of us were able to meet up, and our project progressed faster because of it. Github also played a big role in project management as it was the main place where we hosted our project and tracked the work of our project. Github makes it easy to track the progress of your work by having project boards that all you and your group to post the current issues that need to be worked on, and you are able to assign issues the different group members. With project boards, we were able to keep track with who was working on what and made sure everyone had a part in the project.
With the help of agile project management and Github, we were able to effectively work together as a team and work on completing the final project. Everyone was able to get showcase their strengths by completing different issues on the final project. If done correctly, agile project management will increase the work flow in the group, and everything will run much smoother.
Functional programming, coding standards, and agile project management are all very important concepts to know in the field of Software Engineering, but there are also many other concepts that were taught in this class that are equally as important. As I acquire more experience with these concepts, I believe that they will be very beneficial to me not only as a Software Engineer but also a professional worker beyond web development. The experience that I have learned about software Engineering can help shape who I become in the future.