Mastering the Craft
13 May 2021Web Development
A big portion of ICS 314 was learning about web application development. There are many different topics you can learn from the course and be able to apply it to projects outside of web development. For this essay, I will be focusing on design patterns and coding standards.
Learning about Design Patterns
One of the main topics I learned in software engineering was the usage of Design Patterns.
One may think design patterns is referring to the “decoration” of a web application/program, however Design Patterns is mainly referring to the actual code of the program.
Design Patterns is basically the template a person uses when writing code to a problem that others have already solved.
In ICS 314, the final project required my group and I to create a fully functional website.
Instead of creating a website from scratch, we used the meteor react template as a starting point.
This allowed our group to have a functional website from the very beginning.
From there all we needed to do is make changes following the format of the template.
Saving us a lot of time from writing every single line of code.
Design Patterns is also a technique we already practice outside of web development.
Design patterns come into play even in real life situations.
If you run into a problem that you do not know how to solve, you search it up.
Trying to figure out how to cook a certain meal?
You search it up!
Instead of trying to figure things out on your own, searching up a general solution from others came up with will saves you lots of time and headaches.
That’s what Design Patterns are for.
Learning about Coding Standards
The second topic I learned a lot about in software engineering is the usage of coding standards.
Coding standards is like a set of rules programmers follow to keep code as clean as possible.
These can include rules such as having minimum spacing, correct indentations, good comments, etc.
The main goal of using coding standards is to make code readable for everyone.
Readable code is very helpful especially when others are trying to fix, change, or even mimic the code.
A useful tool for practicing coding standards is ESLint which can automatically identify the any formatting errors you have in your code.
The more you see the same warnings/errors, writing good code will eventually become second nature.
Outside of web development, you will see coding standards pretty much in any coding languages as the theory of coding standards is universal.
You will see similar or identical code formatting in pretty much every piece of code you read.
Only exception is code written by new programmers who are also still learning about coding standards.
Conclusion
Overall, design patterns and coding standards are a few of the main skills practiced in ICS 314 that I can apply outside of web development. Practicing design patterns helps save time. While practicing coding standards helps everyone to be able to understand each other’s code. Using both skills will only benefit those in the long run.