Reflecting on Software Engineering

18 Dec 2020

I’ve come to learn some extremely important concepts throughout this semester, many of which I’ll take with me in the future when moving on to different classes and different projects. Some of these concepts were new to me and some were not; yet, I feel these ideas will help me build good fundamentals in coding and perhaps other future endeavors.

The first concept that the course covered was Open Source Software Development, which is definitely a concept I’ve already been familiar with. Open source is a term that should be known with anyone with any interest in computers or software. It essentially is a way to distribute code and software openly with other people without the need to worry about intellectual property laws. Open source as a concept was formed to bypass the restrictions of licenses of IP laws which I find to be especially potent in today’s day and age where IP and copyright laws are absolutely abused by copyright holders in various fields such as the music industry. The concept of Open Source is just extremely cool to me since it allows people to share their knowledge and progress through their code instead of keeping it all to themselves.

Another concept that really stuck with me is Coding Standards. Coding Standards is the idea of writing and structuring code in a common matter in order to better the readability of the code. Honestly, I wasn’t really a person who wrote the cleanest or more readable code, so the concept of coding standards really stuck out to me since I’ve been sort of careless in writing my code in the past. I feel like Coding Standards is definitely one of the more important lessons to take away from this class since it applies to every single future coding language and project. Maintaining the readability of code is an incredibly important take away in order to better work with other people that would need to read my code as well. This also doesn’t even just apply to coding in general since I could apply this to everyday life. Organization is a life skill that is similar to the concept of Coding Standards, and I honestly feel that its a skill that I really need to get better at.

When I started this semester, I really wanted to build my coding technique considering I would be learning practical application for some concepts I’ve learned in past classes. Throughout the different classes, I’ve felt a clear improvement in this aspect while learning a lot more about Javascript and HTML which I previously thought to be a very clunky and hard to use coding language. On top of everything, I really had a fun time learning more about not just coding but also the various coding concepts throughout this course.