The Last Dance
14 Dec 2023
My Final Ride in ICS 314
This class has been one of my favorite classes that I’ve taken during my college career. Not only because it is stuff that I actually want to learn and use in my career, but because of the many things that it has taught me in the time. This class has helped me a lot in developing my software engineering skills. Learning various different programming has helped me with developing my problem solving skills, both in the Computer Science field and out.
Agile Project Management
One of the main techniques that I learned from this topic is called Issue Driven Project Management. Essentially, you meet twice a week with your team, breakdown each issue into their own branch and set milestones that can be reachable within 1-2 weeks. This type of workflow allows the group to become efficient and help communicate what needs to be done while setting simple and easily realistic goals. I can apply this type of project management onto any project in real life. Instead of breaking down each issue into their own branch, we break down big problems into smaller subproblems so that when the group meets up, we combine them into creating the main product. It is a very effective way to solve problems and I love how it is applicable to any project in real life, not just in computer science.
Ethics
One of the main things about doing Software Engineering is the morality and ethics of the things you do. Most codes of ethics always tell you to do things with the public interest in mind as well as your employer/client’s interest. Also, be professional and help out your colleagues whenever possible with a sense of integrity and dignity. This applies to anywhere in life whenever you are dealing with such world-altering actions such as stealing secret documents just for your own personal gain. Learning about the various different case studies and discussing it with others gives you vast amounts of perspective that you may have been aware of and helps you keep an open mind. Doing the right thing can be the hardest thing, especially when it comes to stressful situations in the world of Software Engineering.
Coding Standards
One of the many things that I first hated in this class was ESLint. ESLint is a tool that tells you if your code does not follow a set standard like if you don’t have a new line at the end of your code or if your strings have double quotation marks instead of the necessary single quotation marks. At first I hated it because it was annoying getting it to work for my laptop since it would not work at all, but I soon realized that it is very helpful at making code look good and having the same standard for everyone makes it easier for everyone to read your code and other people’s code as well. There are many standards in life like essay structures which usually contain an introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion, just like this essay. I think it is important, especially in academia, that common things like essays and code have common structure so that it helps make things easier for everyone to read and understand what’s happening.
Conclusion
All these things helped me improve in Computer Science and in real life as well. This is one of the best classes I have taken so far in my college career and I think everyone should as well, especially if you are going into the Computer Science field. Although most of the topics discussed in the essay apply specifically to Computer Science, you can still take the concept of them and apply them into real life, and it works very well. Thank you Moore for teaching this class, and I wish everyone the best in the future.