Staying Up to Standard
13 Feb 2025Being Up to Standard
In the fifth week of my Software Engineering class, the course material is starting to ramp up and we’re learning a lot more things in a shorter time. In weeks four and five, we’re starting to get into coding standards that help make our code look more organized and uniform between everyone in the class. Using Visual Studio Code, with extensions like ESLint, we’re able to generate errors while writing code if we violate any preset rules that are not following the right format.
This format is created in such a way that it makes code easier to read. Small things like leaving an open curly brace on the same line as a for loop, leaving a new line at the bottom of the file, and even using single quotes to denote strings rather than double quotes. I believe that using ESLint in the early stages of my software engineering career path is a great way to build a strong habit of having clean, organized, and readable code. After all, being able to work in a team efficiently is a key trait to being a good software engineer.
Building Good Habits
When learning anything new for the first time, it takes a bit of time to get used to how everything works, and how we can become efficient at using it. Just like learning how to write code using these new coding standards and learning a new language will take a while to get used to, but in the long run, it will help us develop good code that everyone will be able to read. Having code that is easy to read for everyone is something almost every software engineer should have as a skill because they work in teams and with other people, and they will constantly be sharing code. To make things easier for one another, making code readable makes working on projects way more efficient, this was emphasized by almost all my professors in my introductory ICS courses, and this makes everything make a lot more sense.
ESLint Is Pretty Neat
From my experience with using ESLint in Visual Studio Code, I think that following a certain set of coding standards is very beneficial in the long run, but while actively working on the code, it can be a burden. On top of the errors that we already run into, we now have to worry about how we format our code, which makes programming take a little bit more time. I think that the minor drawback of spending more time fixing code is ultimately undermined by the benefits of readable and neat code. Because eventually when spending enough time working with these coding standards, it will just feel like second nature to format our code in this way.
AI was used to enchance the grammar for this essay.