Starting a Journey in Software Engineering
25 Jan 2019
I will be learning about software engineering for the first time in ICS 314. I am excited to learn about a new topic, especially one that could lead to a potential career. My hopes are to develop a passion for the topic, or at least a good understanding that I could apply to different fields of computer science.
javaScript
In this class, we will be using JavaScript as the main language for engineering software. I do not have much exposure to this language, but based off of other people’s comments about it, I am excited to get to learn JavaScript and use it in this context. Being able to experience new languages is a good way to think about writing code in a new perspective, since each language has different features and benefits. It also allows me to explore different areas of computer science, where I hopefully find a topic I am passionate about and would like to pursue a career in. JavaScript is also popular for website development, which is another topic in computer science that interests me.
What I Hope to Learn
The most important thing for me when taking college classes, is to learn skills that I can use in a future career. Even though I might not want to be a software engineer specifically, I think there are many skills you can transfer to other jobs by learning about software engineering. I’m exactly sure all the skills I am going to learn by taking this course and learing about software engineering, but I am excited none the less. I’m also interested in the processes and ways of thinking in software engineering.
I would like to experience working in groups to write big programs. I have experienced group work previously, but we did not use GitHub to store our code. GitHub is a very powerful tool and widely used by programmers, and it would be nice to be able to write big programs in a group using this tool. Many jobs use GitHub, and it would be very useful to learn about GitHub before having to use it while working at a job. Another thing I would like to experience is working with new software/IDEs to write code. Learning to use new IDEs can seem daunting if you do it by yourself, but experiencing it in a class setting while learning a new language seems to be easier. I have experience with eclipse, but getting to use more software is always useful.