My favorite part of coding is the beautiful filing cabinet
02 Sep 2021
We want to believe that [the niceness of the] handwriting doesn’t matter when we grade, but you know, it does matter.
– One of my former English teachers
“I don’t want to deal with this. It’s a big mess.” But what if it wasn’t?
Organized data is happy data
In software engineering, I like to organize data. I also like to automate repetitive processes and streamline complicated ones. Every bit of code has its proper syntax and formatting. Every name is illustrative. When in doubt, comments in the code help describe what’s going on. Then, at the end of the day, thanks to all of this fine-tuning, you only need to give simple inputs to the program, and it handles the rest.
If you ever need to tweak your program, then your lovely, illustrative formatting and labeling will be as train tracks to lead you where you need to go. If you ever want to add or change some functionality, then there is surely a way to do it.
Perhaps that is why I like what I’m doing my internship. There, my mentors have said before that we work in the administrative side of engineering. We have these projects, and a large part of our time is spent trying to explain the projects clearly and thoroughly to third-parties. Like with programming, you have to envision your process and break it down into steps that flow smoothly and make sense. Sometimes, we have a great mass of data, and we have to organize it into neat categories and lay it all out in a visual format that’s easy to follow and is pleasing to the eye.
I guess that’s the brightest potential I see for software engineering and my future in it. That is, I’d want to use software engineering to improve people’s quality of life. If I can help sort data in a clean manner, or automate a simple task that’s prone to human error, or create a visual layout that’s slick and easy to navigate… then that’ll feel like good software engineering.
Way ahead, with some visual flair
I’ve always been quite interested in working on a database. That is, creating a database, fine-tuning and improving it, or maintaining and adding to it. It could be like the programming equivalent of filing cabinets, or it could be more than that. Since I was younger, I liked to organize things, such as organizing books on shelves.
I’ve also always been quite interested in making a program that has a visual or graphical layout of some sort. This could be a website or webpage, a video game, or an application. I’ve done a little bit of all three before in school, and I would like to do more. I’m really drawn by the interplay of programming the functionality as well as the visual aesthetics of the project, as visual arts is another field I enjoy and am intrigued by, on both a personal level (hobbies) and a professional level (the relationship between visual appeal and customer satisfaction and inspiration).