At this point in time, my time with ICS 314 is about to come to a close. As such, I deem it usefult to reflect back on a few topics that I learned while taking this class, to see how far I’ve grown. Going into this class, I had assumed that it was the webapp development class, and though that definitely was true, I took away so many other skills that I hadn’t personally expected to learn. Two examples, Coding Standards and UI Frameworks, will be the primary focus of this retrospective.
To begin the retrospective, coding standards are essentially the same thing as having regular standards, but with coding. In real life, if you work a job, you are expected to be held to a set of conventions, rules, and guidelines to follow when working. This holds true for coding standards. To achieve these standards, we opt to use a program called Lint. When coding, it’s very easy for code to devolve into unreadable insanity. What Lint does is apply standards to your code to follow, in order to keep everything readable and concise.
From my point of view, I did go into this class knowing what Lint was, having used it before in a separate class. Because of this, I am already aware of the fact that applying standards to code is a worthwhile thing to consider. When using Lint in that other class, while yes, it was definitely annoying to comply with it, it did end up helping me out a lot as it made my code look professional. And for that reason, I can absolutely tell that it will be something I come across again in a later project. Applying standards to code is ultimately a very useful thing to do in the workplace for your peers to understand your code, and I think that even if it doesn’t end up being used, linting is still a good practice anyways, if only to keep your code managable.
Unlike the prior skill, I wasn’t necessarily aware of UI Frameworks. UI Frameworks are essentialy templates that you can use to build a website. In this class, we used Next.js as a template to modify with our code. This was used to create a lot of shopfronts. I Cite specifically Next.js, however, there are plenty of other frameworks that do the same thing as it, and we even got to use another one - Bootstrap. I found these frameworks to be rather interesting to use, because for the most part, they do a good majority of the work in creating a website. By having a graphical output that can be accessed through Bootstrap or Next.js, it makes it so that all of the work you really need to do is coding, but in a more creative way that dictates what the website looks like.
In the real world, if I ever work for a boutique or business, I imagine that these frameworks will come in handy. Because of the sheer simplicity of setting everything up, I think that businesses in general favor these, especially when making an online shop. As such, building these pages through frameworks will offer a way to both program a website, while also being able to stretch other non-software skills, like art, advertising, and even to a degree psychology.