Looking back at when I first started taking the Software Engineering course, I came in knowing from friends who already took this course that it was going to be a lot of work. I finally understood what they had meant by a lot of work. For the good majority of the course, WOD’s were a thing of nightmares for me because they were either full credit or no credit, there was no in between. These WOD’s were made for us students to be challenged by having only a set amount of time to complete some type of programming task. What really made WOD’s a nightmare for me was the first WOD of the course. My experience from that first WOD was horrible because I did not know was fine to do and what was, it eventually led to me failing that first WOD. From there, I learned what I had to do for future WOD’s and I ended up completing all of them with credits. That being said, some of the WOD’s still instilled some fear into me when working on them. Besides the WOD’s, the amount of work to do almost every day for the course was insane in my honest opinion, but I was able to learn quite a bit from the amount of work that was done in just one semester. Out of the many topics that were gone over during the course, open source software development and coding standards are the ones I want to talk about.
The topics of open source software development and coding standards are chosen because I see myself utilizing what I had learned from these two beyond what I had done in the Software Engineering course. To start off, what is open source software development? To make it brief and simple, open source software development is where the software that is being worked is openly available to other people to contribute and is typically a freely distributed software. I see myself utilizing what I had learned from the course because in the past, I always wanted to contribute to these open source code I have seen around the internet, but don’t know how to approach it. I can finally say that I feel more comfortable in looking to contribute to an open source code, though probably start with a small one first. As for coding standards, it is where you make a “common look and feel” to code. As in, make it consistent in readability so that when you read or someone else reads your code, you will know how to read it as it is formatted the same way. I believe out of all the topics, coding standards is the most important as it can make or break the performance of the people you are working with. As I go on to do future projects with other people, I would want to make sure that coding standards are enforced so that some errors and confusion are not to be made later down the pipeline of the project.
As the end of the course comes, I cannot help but say that I am relieved that I am done with this. It is not because I hated this course, but because I think I made through the hurdle of getting the taste of what to expect. What I had learned and endured throughout this course has made me more excited to see what is coming next. Primarily, I think this course has hardened my resolve to pursue my path and the only thing I could say is that my writing sucks.