2021 is a year of continuous epidemics and I spend my lots of sleeping time for taking classes in the past five months since my time zone is different. It is my second fully-online semester and I believe I somehow learned how to deal with online class so far. In my perspective, online classes have less pressure than in-person clasess because I do not need to go to classroom and see people, which makes me need to force myself to keep up with the courses. In the Fall 2020, I did not perform well since I could not have a good time for doing assignments. However, I almost finish all of them in Spring 2021, which is a good improvement. One of the classes that has numerous tasks is ICS 314, but I appreciate those assignments since they really help me learn a lot. ICS 314 is a software engineering course, and it is not like my many other biology courses which students learned directly from lectures. In fact, students should learn things from assignments, readings, and workouts. The experinece of self-learning might help students have better performance in the real world since it is kind of similar to what people do after leaving school.
The Intergrated Development Environment, which is IntelliJ Idea, plays a significant role throughout the 2021 Spring. In previous ICS course, I only experienced jGRASP. Therefore, IntelliJ Idea is pretty new for me. It takes time to get used to the new software, but I could feel the time somehow reduced compared to the first exposure of development environment since I have the idea of how a development environment works. In order to be a software engineer, I believe the ability of learning how to use new development environment is essential because different places may use different development environments. Therefore, every experience matters since they could decrease the obstacles when people want to be familiar with DE. Besides, IDE provided more complicated feature and assisted developers to debug, test, and code more efficiently. Compilations became easier since developers do not have to deal with them separately.
Ethics is always an interesting issue to consider and it is present in many field. In Biology, ethics such as consents for experimets of human or human cloning is relatively obvious to recognize than the ethics in Software Engineering. However, it is necessary to think of others when the actions potential could have impacts. In the field of Computer Science, a very big part is associated with non-living machines. It might be a reason of forgeting other users or developers who are involved. With the advancement of science and technology, human beings start to encounter issues that have not happen before. Although ethics sometimes can be considered as obstacles of progressions, it is still important to protect ourselves from making irreversible outcomes. In the lecture, we discussed about an ethical issue of testing the Linux without permission. I do believe those tests could improve the system, but no consent is kind of a taboo in many field. The review board did not perform the function as it should, which was unfortunate. Reminding ourselves of getting consents before actions could reduced a lot of problems and wishing everyone can do their best to implement it!