Essays

Engineering for the Real World: What ICS 314 Taught Me

16 May 2025

ICS 314, Software Engineering, is more than just a web development course—it’s a deep dive into the principles and practices of modern software engineering. Through hands-on assignments and a team-based final project, we explored essential concepts such as Agile Project...

Software Engineering

Learning with AI: How I Navigated ICS 314

11 May 2025

Introduction AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence, provides students with access to instant support, personalized learning resources, and powerful tools to enhance both understanding and productivity. In education, AI empowers learners to approach complex topics more confidently and to work...

Software Engineering

Planning, Predicting, Performing

08 May 2025

During our work on the Campus Plate Mate project, our team practiced effort estimation and tracked our time spent on issues through GitHub. Although our estimates were often inaccurate—sometimes significantly off—the process of making them still provided unexpected benefits. It...

Software Engineering

Design Patterns and the Recipe That Built Plate Mate

24 Apr 2025

When I first started coding in JavaScript, I approached it like a home cook with a pantry full of unfamiliar ingredients—excited, but often guessing. I could slice up an array or stir through an API, but my early projects lacked...

Software Engineering

Designing in Bootstrap 5

27 Feb 2025

I was excited to learn Bootstrap, the world’s most popular framework for building responsive sites, but I didn’t expect it to be so complicated. Before diving into my experience with Bootstrap, I’d like to briefly introduce the framework. Bootstrap 5...

Software Engineering

How ICS 314 Can Land You a Job

16 Feb 2025

I recently had the opportunity to attend the “Tech Minds Meetup,” an event where students like me could meet and interact with software engineers and company founders from both local and global companies. Events like this are crucial for students...

Software Engineering

Enforcing Coding Standards: From Checkstyle to ESLint

13 Feb 2025

Coding standards are essential guidelines that help ensure consistency and readability in software development. My first exposure to coding standards was through CheckStyle in JGrasp. Initially, I struggled with Checkstyle, finding it difficult to understand the errors and how to...

Software Engineering

No Stupid Questions, Just Smart Approaches

30 Jan 2025

“You’ve probably heard the saying, ‘There’s no such thing as a dumb question,’ maybe from a teacher or a speaker trying to encourage shy folks in the audience to speak up. And they’re not wrong—Carl Sagan once said something similar:...

Software Engineering Stack Overflow

Coding Under Pressure: Surviving TypeScript

23 Jan 2025

As a newbie to Typescript, I have noticed that while it is a new concept for me, there are quite a few similarities from languages I’ve learned; such as C, C++, and Java. For example, both Java and Typescript share...

Software Engineering

Caught in the Loop: Never-Ending Cycle of an Overthinker

22 Jan 2025

“Will I ever be good enough?” “Can I ever catch up with the smarter people in my class?” Questions like these flow endlessly like a river in my head, for I am not the best designer, nor am I proficient...

Software Engineering Perseverance Experiences