Although the semester is over, the learning never stop. You learn something new everyday and I did learn something new mostly everyday regarding software engineering this semester. The first and foremost is time management without it nothing will get done in a fashionable manner. In between the timed WOD, workout of the day, various project, and homework things got hectic. That is just an overall thing, there are three concepts that really stuck out of the rest: coding standards, agile project management, and design patterns. These three concepts while mainly focus on software engineering, can be applicable to a lot of different fields and studies.
Standards is pretty easy to understand, it is the baseline of what a product or practice must achieve to be consider professional or adequate for business. Take that definition and apply it to programing and coding. Standards keeps practices uniformly allowing for smoother transfer of duty from one person to the next. It makes workflow at a steady pace and for the next person to learn what code does what so a mission critical aspect will not be missing when the time comes. Adhering to the coding standard would be something I would strive to do in my career. It helps one discipline oneself to not take shortcut and produce lower quality work.
This is another one of those concepts that you cannot escape from. PROJECTS. They are pretty much everywhere and everything. They are just a specific plan to get this huge endeavor complete. That is pretty much what agile project management is about, planning to break down a huge work into smaller more bite size work and get it done. It was very helpful when we were doing our group project Manoa Club Finder, link below, when at first seems daunting but was actually fun and easy when we took it step by step. Instead of diving headfirst we set up three milestones that we want to hit and then within those milestones we broke it down even more so we can divide up the work. For instance, the project requires us to set up many pages, we first made a rough draft of how the page should looked like and then everyone was to design the pages with their own little twist. The pages got done fast because it did not feel like a chore where it would had been if we separate the task differently.
I have gone over design pattern in detail in another one of my essays, but it still stands out to me out of everything else I have learned. The concept itself is quite simple, there are a bunch of problems that reappears from time and time again and there are these solutions that just work because we have solved these problems time and time before. This is similar to learning about history, you learn from what had happen and see how you can apply what the forerunner did to your problems. The answer is not given directly but the core idea on how to solve it would be more than enough to start you on the right path. Who knows what the future may bring but nothing is impossible, there will be a patteren somewhere within whatever problems that will come.