It has been a wild ride it really has. When we first started this semester in Software Engineering we weren’t sure what to expect but through the hardships, challenges, projects, and blog entries we’ve finally reached the conclusion of the semester. It is still a bit of a shock to me that we have reach this point this quickly, but with all good things there has to come an ending.
Coming into this class I often questioned ICS as a field of study; we’ve learned programming languages, programming history, thought strategies for programming, hardware, interactions, databases, but we have never come out with a project that would be displayable to the common person. It made me question the capabilities of an ICS student for getting a job with no experience making their work into a product for common use. That hesitation has since waned because of this software engineering class. For the first time I’ve seen through the looking glass at ways people are meant to work together on projects, how the status of a project gets maintained, how people go through testing standards, so many factors I’ve wondered about for awhile. And thanks to this class I’ve also seen how just knowing how to program does not a soft engineer make.
The class and software engineering in general is really a fascinating field, I haven’t felt more enthusiastic about churning out a project as I have this semester. Often times even more so than good judgment allows, several times today I’ve thought about taking the extra effort to work on the project more for extra credit, but my timing, my vision often doesn’t take time into account and with final exams looming overhead it was in my better decision to refrain from doing it. The concept of making a project from start to finish has always been an interest and this class has shown me it firsthand.
As grateful as I am to see the projects and do work on them at the same time I felt like this class was an amazingly difficult class to handle. Besides the constant readings, the weekly projects, quick quizzes, screencasts, and blog entries, there is hardly a moment to catch your breath sometimes. It takes a lot to keep oriented in the right direction but at the same time it leaves very little space for error or even technical issues. And still the things you learn in class as a result is amazing. The concern is how much of it can we keep in our minds and how well did we learn some of the more strained ideas.
Even with the concerns over time I can’t deny the great deal of things I’ve learned in this class. Ant, JUnit, PMD, checkstyle, the essence of Java style, Robocode, SVN, Wicket, the things we’ve learned in this class overtakes a lot of the other programming centric classes I’ve had. This kind of exposure is precious for our field and feels like something everyone who wants to do Computer Science work needs to invest time in, if not as a future career path, just for the understanding of what happens.
As I come to a personal close for this class for the semester the temptation to do more still gnaws at me. The thoughts that I could fix our problems with Eco-Depot, I could do more, make me want to try it, but understanding what I have to do in the following weeks and my own limitations made me realize that trying to do it would be risking my other classes. My drive is still there though, and with ICS414, the next Software Engineering class, ahead of me next semester, I look forward to learning more, and seeing if I have what it takes next time to go beyond the current “me” that is writing this right now. Where that goes, is another story for another time.
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