My Goals in Software Engineering
04 Sep 2020
I have always been interested in coding ever since in high school, but back then I could not get into the coding classes offered and the closest to coding I had was creating games in Scratch with block coding. Getting into college, I was exposed to coding in Java as well as many other languages, and it really confirmed how much I enjoyed coding. Now in my last semester of school, I am taking ICS 314, Software Engineering and there are various things that I want to take away from this class.
Programming Skills
Currently I would consider myself ok at programming, as I know how to apply what I currently know in order to solve various problems. I know however, that there are many coding techniques as well as different branches of coding that I have not experienced yet. One of the programming skills I would like to learn is well, how to work with much more complicated programs. By this I would like to see how one would approach building a difficult system, how they take the future of the code into account as well as how different parts of the code would interact with each other. I know from previous coding projects that the code I write could not be considered the best as it was obvious that as long as it worked it was just left like that without any intentions of coming back to clean it up.
Another coding skill I would like to learn in this class is how to work well with other people. This subject was briefly brought up in prior coding classes, but I did not get a chance to really delve into collaborating with others with a service like GitHub. Going back to the same project mentioned before, creating code in a group was kind of annoying as it resulted in one of us having to copy the code the others made, and trying to hash it into the main code so we would get something functional back out. So being able to work more fluidly with other people on code would be a very useful skill, that I hope to learn in software engineering.
Experiences
In this class, I hope to have many fun experiences just coding, as well as interacting with my classmates. Especially since the current situation has forced all of us to online learning, I hope to still have some interesting experiences in my software engineering class. With the way the class is going currently, with the workout of the days, the class Discord server, I am already having fun with how the class dynamic works. With things just getting started, I believe that there will be even more interesting experiences, whether it be getting obsessed in solving a coding problem or getting frustrated with friends at a project.
To finish off, even through the difficulties that online learning entails, I hope to learn a lot about software engineering and enjoy some fun experiences coding with friends.