Software Engineering Rollercoaster
08 May 2022
My Rising Tech Stack
Through out the entirety of this course, my personal technology stack had grown substantially. Although this course was focused on web development, it had taught me a lot more than just web development. ICS 314 has pushed me to learn new technology within a short span of time given. This was emphasized through weekly “workout of the days” which were basically small quizzes testing our knowledge of the module assigned that given week. I felt that this really helped me actually learn the material rather than having the information go in one ear and out the other. From coding standards to frameworks the experience gained here was immense.
Prior to Software Engineering I
Before taking this course, there were little to no standards when it came to programming in my previous classes. ICS 111 (Intro to Java) had no coding standard at all and anything went through. I could have coded everything in one single line no spaces and I felt like that could have gone through one or two assignments with little to no repurcussions. ICS 211 (data structures) introduced a form of coding standard but wasnt as extensive as ESLint that we are using now. It has cleaned up a lot of my codebase in all my areas of work from my projects to my weekly assignments.
A New Way To Do UI
With the introduction to UI frameworks in this course, I am never going back to manually styling everything myself when a framework does it all for me and it does the job better. This technology is absolutely great, I can push out amazing looking UI within no time given how easy it is to use. Learning how to use any framework opens up doors for other frameworks that we have not covered in this course i.e. Bootstrap which is another popular framework for UI.
Roller Coaster
Just like a roller coaster, we’ve started at the bottom and slowly ramped up to the peak of our tech stack. The final slope down was our project where I’ve had the pleasure to work with wonderful team members through the latter half of this semester. There was definitely a lot to unpack throughout the first half, however, everything was starting to peice together nicely from learning JavaScript to understanding the inner workings of functional programming. This is what software engineering is all about. Constantly adapting and learning to apply our knowledge, creating something functional and worth showing.