“Hello World” is usually the first project that many programmers do to get initiated into the programming world. I remember sitting in one of my first programming classes and learning the basics of coding with print statements, if statements, for loops and the like. Then as I took more classes, I slowly became more comfortable and familiar with coding. The more classes I got under my belt, the more opportunities I had to witness “pretty” code. As a beginner, you do whatever it takes to make your code work. However, as you get more experience, you eventually get a feel for the right coding standards and where things should approximately go for easy readability. With being a computer science student, you will definitely hit a class that finally teaches you the nuances of programming.
My professors, in almost all my classes, tell me there are many different ways to arrive at the solution. The same can be said for programming. However, people have invented standards in order to make sure other people can read your code and thus increase the odds of arriving to the solution easier and quite possibly faster. In programming, this is called coding standards. The ICS 314 Software Engineering course provided me with many opportunities to polish up on this. In fact, bless the programming gods, I was able to use ESLint to automatically format my code to bring it up to par with the coding standards.
On top of being able to automatically format my code, I could also use different user interface frameworks to add more function to my code without having to write every line myself. You can think of this as shortcuts to magical spells. Instead of having to chant out a long spell and set up your altar or whatnot, you can get straight to the spell with only a few words, thanks to a library or set of libraries. With an automatic coding standards formatter and user interface frameworks gained from this class, I know I’ve picked up important tools I can use in future projects to make my life much easier. These tools will help me build bigger and better things in the future, I just know it.