Enroll in online software engineering courses today and start advancing your career. Software engineering pertains to building and developing intangible products for today's modern world. We routinely use software to accomplish everyday tasks like online banking, messaging friends, storing files in the cloud, and so much more which an engineer built. If you've been wondering how to learn software engineering, you've come to the right place! A software engineer is a person who designs, tests, maintains, and evaluates the software that they've built.
Software engineers work with businesses, governments, hospitals, non-profits, and more organizations and companies to develop the software they need to run correctly. On the contrary good naming would many times save us from reading the internals. Here is an example of naming vs better naming. In the first example, we are repeating understood information again. In the better example, we can see that the setName method clearly implies what it does as equal to writing setStudentName.
Ideally, the internals of a method or a class should be roughly understood by a correct and good name. The next best step is to write a good 2 lines of explanation of the method and its class. Imagine how many times you have read a method where you have no idea what's going on.
How much those 2 lines would help. Do some good in this world, please!! One of the reasons why I love Golang is that It reminds the developer to write that piece for each public exported piece of code.
Another important lesson I learned is how important test cases are. Initially like everyone I considered my project done as soon as I finished writing code Guess what used to happen, something would break many times and something could be high risk.
Writing test cases helps us catch important bugs in the initial stages of development. Good test cases is a certificate against your code that certifies things are working fine at your end.
Correlate with timestamps. When troubleshooting, use the timestamp of events as a help. Look for even increments. For example, if the system restarted, and a request was sent out around milliseconds before, maybe a timer triggered the action that lead to the restart. Face to face has the highest bandwidth. When discussing how to solve a problem, being face to face beats video, call, chat and email.
I am often amazed at how much better the solutions are after discussing them in person with colleagues. Rubber ducking. Whenever you are stuck, go to a colleague and explain the problem to them.
Sounds like magic, but works surprisingly often. Reading and running the code is often great for figuring out what it does and how it works.
But if you have the possibility to ask someone knowledgeable perhaps the original author , use that option too. Being able to ask specific questions, and follow-up questions to those, can give you information in minutes that would otherwise take days to get. Share credit. Make sure to give credit where credit is due. Go out of your way to mention who else helped or contributed.
Try it. If you are unsure of how a certain language feature works, it is easy to write a little program that shows how it works. The same applies when testing the system you are developing.
What happens if I set this parameter to -1? What happens if this service is down when I reboot the system? Explore how it works — fiddling around often reveals bugs, and at the same time it deepens your understanding of how the system works. Sleep on it. As a result, the solution can seem obvious the next day.
It is stimulating to work with different people, on a different product or in a different company. In my view, too many people just passively stay at the same job year after year, only changing if they are forced to. Keep learning. One of the great things with software development is that there is always room to learn and know more. Try out different programming languages and tools, read books on software development, take MOOC courses. Small improvements soon add up to make a real difference in your knowledge and abilities.
Building small — non general — systems can be easy in the beginning but pain when you have to add some more complex functionality. Thanks for commenting. Nice post Henrik. Reblogged this on Aaron Holbrook on WordPress. It has a lot of these points in one form or another! Thanks for the tip! But it applies to every aspect of programming, including design. If something you are designing does not seem quite right sleep on it and let your mind unwind the correct path for the code to flow.
I think this is doubly true when you are new to a project or new to programming. Little issues just slow you down. Thanks for the great and thoughtful post. One of the pitfalls for software engineers is designing and building too much. There is a good argument for building a small system as you note and then expanding it.
If it succeeds it will go viral or at least semi-viral , going from a few test users to tens of thousand of users. The pattern with web applications that get noticed is that they get attacked and, frequently, successfully hacked. To avoid this I have carefully built in security features salted passwords, locked down IP access.
Any stories associated with that tip? Good question Chris! Every time I was called out to have helped it felt very motivating to hear, so I started to do the same thing myself. I think being appreciated for what you do makes you want to keep doing a good job. Very nicely put. An alternative or a complement to Rubber Ducking would be to write the problem down. Clarity in defining the problem often takes you straight to the solution.
Excellent article. Your team should agree on a standard log format and develop tools to process and analyze them can be as simple as Excel and a macro. Standardized log format means you can build one tool to help with log processing and analysis. Great for when you go into production, or have to investigate issues from the field. It takes a long time to get information from the field. So log depth and management are also a consideration. How many times have you been on a project when the feeling was that programming will fix it.
Thanks for commenting Roland. Yes, logging really is important. Wonderful list! Thank you! I like the idea of sleeping on it. Now I have to decide whether to bring in a hammock or an air mattress. Good articles. I agree with everything, though Id add something about … seeking out and adopting design patterns and best practice … peer code reviews … seeking out and using whatever tools are available to help your test your code, eg online validators, Firebug for front-end web stuff, an IDE, etc.
I heartily agree. However, I see a strong tendency for managers to prefer employees who rush to make changes, simply patching over the top of the existing code until it is a mess of overlapping and conflicting layers of spaghetti.
Because the tech world is constantly evolving, software engineers need to be committed to learning new information and growing their skills to adapt to whatever direction the industry moves in. If you have a knack for working with programming languages and want to improve the performance of codebases, learning about software engineering might be right for you.
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