Software engineering may sound like a course solely for those who want to dive into that field. For me, the course offered me more than simply learning to code or meet deadlines. Rather, I was taught how to manage my works in a way that allows any outsider to easily comprehend what I made, and build on it. Likewise, it gave me the necessary skills to be able to understand someone’s work and build upon it. While the course mainly focused on enhancing that with code, I now see the necessity of commonplace language in order to effectively communicate with whoever I may work with, without knowing anything about their background on the topic at hand.
Coding standards for this course were essentially the outlines to coding properly. While there are other ways to produce the same result via code, not everyone is as comfortable with one method as someone else may be on another method. I remember working with a classmate on conditional statements, only to realize that my knowledge of the switch operator was beyond their “if and else” understanding. By using coding standards, there is a higher chance that someone external to a project will understand what your code is about. While working at a tutoring center this semester, it made me realize that not all students that come in received the same mathematical education as me, and it opened my eyes to teach a math topic either akin to the coding standards equivalent, or to situate the topic in more familiar terms. For example, while rotating solids about an axis in Calculus I, I related the same to beach balls, antique vases, and even car tires!
Trust is a very important thing to me, so while I was creating the final project for my software engineering course, it was my top priority at team meetings to ensure that whatever information users gave to us was being used responsibly. In a sense, I thought of each user as a good friend or colleague. I would not discriminate against certain users’ personal details, nor would I want to sell them out after they put their trust into me and a product of mine. Ethics is a universal topic, and learning how to manage them in an online environment is just as important. When a user utilizes a site, by giving as little as their email to make an account, the owner of the site has been given an immense amount of trust by the user to keep that information safe.
I live with the philosophy that humans are eternal learners, that everything we do and every experience we come across has some lesson to it. For me, something that may seem inapplicable outside of a school environment somehow finds its way back to reality. For software engineering, I learned to better communicate in a team setting, by treating all teammates with respect, and working in a manner that conveys the message effectively. Although this was a class meant for software engineers, I will most likely find myself continuously using what I have learned throughout my mathematics degree and beyond.