Grab Software Engineering by the Horns
02 Sep 2021
My interest in software engineering began a decade ago when I taught myself basic HTML and CSS to try and make Tumblr themes for me and my friends exactly to the specifications that we wanted. After foraying into a chemistry degree, then the food and beverage industry, a good friend of mine took me to the RISE tech conference in Hong Kong in 2019. It was at this point in life where I was not sure what kind of direction I wanted to go in terms of my career and university degree. The same friend began to give me small projects to help him with his websites that he was building and from that experience I decided to enroll as a computer science student.
Leading up to today
So far during my university career there was more emphasis on learning the structure and syntax of programming languages, i.e. Java, C and C++, instead of software engineering per se. Despite having little to no prior exposure to athletic software engineering, my coursework thus far has prepared me to fully engage in the upcoming semester’s material. Specifically, I personally prefer to work in back-end but I know to be a good software engineer I need exposure to both front-end and back-end to help me be well rounded and self-sufficient; JavaScript is definitely going to be a key factor in successfully achieving this goal.
Looking to the future
The skills I’d like to develop namely centers around writing effective and concise code; figuring out the best and fastest methods for my software to run. Of course, being able to recognize the space and time complexities of different programs I write is a key factor in efficient software engineering, which I am currently developing in Algorithms (ICS 311). All the different modules in ICS 314 are directly preparing me for my future career by, including but not limited to, providing JavaScript programming knowledge, integrated development environments (IDE) exposure, user interface design, and application design. I personally am looking forward to the databases module as I am taking the Data Science track here at UH Mānoa and working with SQL for my part time job with the UH Water Resources Research Center.
