After 4 months of study, we finally walked till the end. Looking back at these three years, I learned a lot about programming, from simple Javascript to web application development. Many kinds of programming languages are opening new worlds to me. For this semester, It was a hard time for everyone. The distance learning made everything uncomfortable and inconvenient. I kept running between work and homework. Everything was tough. And I also missed many important things in class. It has been a hard time to do time management since the COVID-19. However, I still learned many skills on web application development from those nice classmates. Those skills are really helping me to make my homework and project better up to standard. These new concepts are extremely important and it is going to help me in the future courses. There are 3 things I am really interested in and I have used a lot in my homeworks and projects, Coding standard, Open Source Software Development and Design Patterns.
Easily one of the most useful, early and reliable skills sets to master. In my opinion, fundamentally the parts to work on. It helps to stomp out bad habits, reworks on structuring, rephrasing, and readability. Coding standards are like an English writing format, in which we follow the rules to keep things simplified and easy to find. Others may disagree but I can see it somewhat similar to MLA and APA formats in an essay. The more consistent your codes are with the standards of the language of your choosing, the easier it is to review it and rewrite the code. Setting these standards for yourself also gives you a minimum you want to give yourself to work on. This will probably help me in the future by teaching me a rigorous way for me to keep a tidy formatting of whatever it is I do in the future. This portion teaches me self discipline and I am grateful for that.
Our final projects received an abundance of feedback from my friends and group mates alike. Something I feel I should reflect on because in a way this is like coding standards, a core mechanic on organizing. Where coding standards are for formatting, design patterns are the bread and butter in problem solving techniques. Honestly sometimes I fear I may rely on this too much in the future. It almost feels like a cheat code to use for almost all purpose, problem solving string of codes that identify most of the underlying issues with my code. Still, making use of this and working with this in mind is crucial for tidy, and legible lines of code.
I was not sure if we were gonna cover this in the course, but I am grateful that we did. Open source coding is a godsend for me. I download emulators for games, specific mods for games, and even school work help from open source, ‘specially from places like github. I really enjoyed learning about the freedoms and limitations of open sourcing codes. I really like the fact that we have all these generous people that are willing to share codes, projects, and ideas via platforms like GitHub and SourceForge. From what I learned, it was an idea formed to ignore all these annoying restrictions, and not willing to be selfish with copyright holds.