Before our software engineering class my knowledge about web development, working on projects with others, and coding standards were fairly minimal. Over the semester I learned a lot about various concepts in software engineering that I felt have uses outside of class that can serve me better in my career. An important benefit of what we learned is that although we mostly focused on website creation and development, many of the practices we learned can be used in other ways that go beyond our specific applications.
One of the main concepts we learned was coding standards. Coding standards provided us a way to write our code in a way that could be understood by multiple people who use the same coding standards. It eliminated the issue of trying to decipher code written by others in ways you don’t recognize. It also reinforced practice by repetition. Beyond practical programming using the idea of coding standards can be used in ways related to other practices, such as when working on our final project we had standards we adhered to that we expected from each other and became second nature. We met regularly, presented issues in a way that was readable and by continuing to do this issues were solved quicker and confusion was minimized.
Beyond coding standards we also learned valuable ways to work on a large scale web development project with multiple people. With multiple people comes many issues, including division of labor, communication, and like what was said previously, standards to be followed. With division of labor each person was assigned certain sections of a project to do with regular updates to be expected, we learned how useful github could be in seeing each other’s progress. In real-time we could upload progress on our own machines and our partners would be able to instantly see the changes. Communication was enforced by meeting regularly and anytime a final change had to be made on the master version of the project it was communicated to all members.
Overall, Software Engineering taught me many valuable lessons that I expect to use in the future. Programming work-outs showed us how to work under pressure. Our project taught us how group applications that we may have to do in our career will work.