A Deeper Understanding
13 May 2025I am now reaching the end of my Spring 2025 semester at UH Manoa. Having taken many classes in my time at this institution, I can say that my Software Engineering course was among the more interesting courses.
Starting in computer science from the lower levels felt more challenging as everything we learned was completely new to me. But all that I’ve learned in preceeding classes has cumulated to help me gain a better understanding of ICS 314. There were lessons that were familiar to material learned in ICS 111, 211, and 212, and there were lessons that were 100% new material to me. But through it all, I can say I have a more firm grasp of Software Engineering now at the end of the semester.
Covered Topics
Agile Project Management
One of the things that stuck with me the most throughout ICS 314, possibly because it happened most recently, was Agile Project Management (AGM). The style of AGM we learned in ICS 314 was called Issue Driven Project Management, which we executed through GitHub.
This was not my first time experiencing group project delegation via GitHub. I attended KCC for my ICS 211 class where we also completed a group project through GitHub, but the way we managed our individual tasks for our final 314 project was different, and in my opinion, more efficient. Issue Driven Project Management had us break our project down into smaller issues that we could assign to ourselves or others. We could track the status of our issues and break our project down into 3 separate milestones. It was a lot easier to manage than it was in 211 and did help us stay on track.
User Interface Frameworks
This class was my first introduce to user interface frameworks, and I can confidently say that I would be very open to work in a position that deals largely with this kind of programming. The only form of user interaction I had known before ICS 314 was all in the terminal, using a scanner to read lines of user input in a Java or C file.
User Interface Frameworks with web frameworks was a huge game changer for me. I was able to learn so much more about what you can do with software engineering once we began learning this topic. We got more into the style aspects of websites, which I found to be really entertaining. It was nice to see my low level terminal interactions from earlier classes transition into websites with actual visual assistance on what that terminal interaction could’ve looked like.
Plus, with tools like Bootstrap, React, and NextJS, there are so many ways you could execute your vision on a web application. All these tools give access to style components to help make your application more palatable and can help you paint a picture of what you want your user’s to see and feel when they interact with your projects!
To Be a Programmer or Not To Be
I will say that this class has opened a much wider view of possible positions in Computer Science. Of course, I can imagine I’ve only scratched the surface of Software Engineering. But as more is made available to me, the more interested I become in this field! It’s been no easy feat getting to this point in my degree, but because of informative and exciting classes like this one, I know there’s only more waiting to be learned and appreciated.