Software Engineering sounded quite intimidating to me when I first heard about it. I started thinking about things like AI that could take over the world. I mean, of course I shouldn’t really be too concerned about that especially as a third-year Computer Science student, but I guess it’s good to have a great imagination. Upon reading a bit about ICS 314 and what is offers in terms of Software Engineering experiences, I would say this has been an absolute win. Not only did I gain valuable skills in Project Management, Critical Thinking and others but I also gained professional development in optimizing a LinkedIn account and a GitHub techfolio.
A lot of the things I have learned in this course is very much applicable in real life scenarios, which provide me many different approaches to things like homeworks, projects, and others. For example, Issue Driven Project Management was probably the best thing that I had every learned about and managed due to the flexibility and role management it provides. Especially on a great platform like GitHub, it allows you to assign specific tasks to group members so that it allows each member to focus on their own task and to provide the best work that they can. By using this type of management, you aren’t hovering over each group members work and micromanaging them because that gets pretty tedious and some may now enjoy your company that much.
Coding standards have changed my perspective on clear and well-formatted code since I was a freshmen in ICS 111. The fact that ICS 314 was able to further elaborate on the specifics of Coding Standards is one of the things I appreciated the most about the course. As a Freshmen in Computer Science, my code used to look all jumbled up and indecipherable due to the poor formatting, bad positioning of curly braces, no camelcase, and other factors that made it near impossible to read the code. Coding Standards is something you can apply to real-world applications like typing up a essay, creating a Powerpoint presentation, or presenting a proposal to an advisor/professor. Nobody would like to listen to speak for 8-10 minutes with a mediocre looking Powerpoint presentation; it’s just not professional to come unprepared with no means of preparation.
Computer Science is very dynamic in the sense that a lot of things you talk about in the courses are applicable to many other aspects in life. You can’t find an algorithm that meets your current project runtime requirement? Go search some Open Source Code on Stack Overflow or GitHub; be proactive. You need to figure out how to format an essay in a specific format? Go search the different types of formatting like MLA that you can refer to. Overall, my experience in ICS 314 and Software Engineering has really piqued my interest and I would be so grateful if I had ever gotten an opportunity to intern at a company like Amazon, Google, etc. It was impressive to reflect upon my journey from not knowing anything about web application and Javascript to being able to create my own efficient web application in a group environment.