I noticed how most of the time I spend programming is spent debugging. During these past few months, I strongly believe that my software engineering skills have improved. For example, in previous programming courses that I’ve taken, whenever I run into a bug, it felt like I would take hours just to figure out what was wrong then I would spend another few hours to figure out a solution that works. But now? I feel confident in my ability to fix bugs in a timely manner.
Development environments (or IDEs) are tools that software developers use to create applications. IDEs provide a lot more features than the regular text editors. These features are very helpful for learning to code or even debugging, and are one of the biggest reasons that I believe my software engineering skills improved in the past few months. Of course, you can still create applications using the regular text editors, but why would you do that when there are better ways to do it. My main takeaway from this is that if there is a better way to do something, then why not? You can save a lot of time and effort by utilising the best tools available.
Coding standards are rules or guidelines that improves the readability of code. I’m sure every software engineer has run into a problem in their code while programming. Some problems are so complex, that outside help might be needed. That’s where coding standards come into play. It makes everything easier for you and any other developers that are trying to help. In ICS 314 we used a standardized coding style and a tool called ESLint, which alerted us (usually in real time) whenever we have errors in our code. From my experience, ESLint solved majority of my coding errors this past semester. But when you have an error that ESLint doesn’t solve, that’s when you may need to ask for help. To get the best answers possible, you would want to make sure your code is readable. My main takeaway from this is the importance of being neat and organized. Neat and organized work will save time for both you and others looking to help.