Beyond Web Application Development
11 Aug 2025
Software Engineering
We’ve learned a lot in this course, and I deeply value everything that was taught. On the surface, software engieering seems like its purely just web application development, which in a way is true. But there is a lot of fundamentals that we learned during this course that all applies to web application development as a whole. When I think about all the work we did, yes, the whole goal was to recreate websites, and make our own websites and such, but there was a lot more that we learned that just that. Things such as Design Patterns, which is essentially a reusable template or solution of how to solve a particular problem. This saves a lot of time and effort when trying to solve different issues or complete certain tasks. In this course, there were several times where we were given a template via Github to complete the assignment. This obvious saves us students a LOT of time when completing the assignment because of the template provided.
Moreover, when thinking about ‘web application design’ don’t you think of stuff like websites? Well as you know, almost anything online has a UI (user interface) and in this course, we have learned how to work with and create user interface frameworks. This is essentially what makes websites stand out and what the user sees. More specfically, in this class we have learned how to use bootstrap5, react, and next.js. We used these to recreate the islandsnow website homepage. And despite them all looking the exact same way as the end product, the steps to get there were different, which I found very interesting and fun. I think its nice how we are able to achieve the same end product using different methods.
Lastly, in this class, we one of the many things we learned about was configuration management. Configuration Management is simply the organizing of changes to software, documentation and other important logistical issues when it comes to dealing with software engineering. This was heavily utilized tool in ICS 314 because almost everything we did was through Github, where we needed to create new repositories, new branches, merge the new branches to the main branch, clone repositores to the local repository, and more. At first, this was quite hard for me since I never really used Github prior to this class, so learning where everything was and how it works was difficult, but now that I understand where mostly everything is and how everything works, Github is such a nice place to collaborate code and such.