Looking Back on A Semster of Devlopment
18 Dec 2025
Open Source Development!
What is Open Source Software you may ask? It is the software we use and have in our daily lives daily wouldn’t be what it is now if it wasn’t for open source software. our project template was code written by someone else, which we then were allowed to use, build, and expand on. So too was our portfolio page. I feel that if it weren’t for such cases of Open Source Software Development, it would be much harder to get work done. It also helps assist project development for other people, allowing for improvements or variants of the original project. In the case that a project has to be discontinued, it can be picked up by other people. Losing passion for a personal project, who hasn’t been there. It can happen in software development too. One example of Open Source Development is Jenkins. Jenkins is what we used for continuous integration (where code is quickly tested automatically by using code, so errors are immediately found). It was originally called Hudson, owned by Oracle. Because people didn’t like the direction they were taking it, they made a fork (copy) of Hudson, and it became widely adopted as it impoved to be better and what people wanted.
Coding Standards
Coding Standards in software is kind of like how we were taught to write in high school. Coding standards are like a way to format what programmers write. This is important, as it helps other programmers read and understand what is being written. Recently, because of this semester, I learned a lot about coding standards and how they are implemented. Originally, I only thought of it as projects all having their own predefined standards, but we used a code corrector, called a linter, to make sure our programs and files followed a coding standard. It was way easier than having to make our own standards and going through many lines of formatting manually. I see this idea being used everywhere a text editor is present, even outside of web application development. LaTeX, for example, follows their own set of “coding standards”. LaTeX is a markdown language (text file with formatting syntax to change the look of text) meant to display math equations and other math-related diagrams, all through text. Organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery have their own LaTeX coding standards. It’s called best practices in their own words, and it’s to help with readability so that reviewers can have an easier time going through the publishing process. It’s not programming, but LaTeX writers have definitely benefited from following either standards set by organizations and their own predefined standards. Even if there is no standard to follow, they still have standards to achieve readability.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I feel that it is important to try and understand the benefits of what we learned, and to try and think about it outside the scope of a project we would work on. Being able to actually experience what it meant to use an open source project and to build something like my portfolio was fun. The same goes for learning about coding standards in class. It convinced me to continue to use coding standards in the future, not just for other people, but so that when I look back on it, I’m looking at clean code that isn’t messy.