As I continue with the internship's engineering projects, I am noticing how understanding code written by someone else is critical in software engineering. Unlike most of my Computer Science classes where I write code from scratch, I am working with already written code at my internship.
This difference is because the objectives of classwork are to understand and apply concepts and, hence, requires the development of a project from scratch, unlike an internship, whose objectives go beyond individual application of coding concepts to how well one can collaborate on a team project and resolve merge conflicts.
Additionally, in the industry, software engineers' roles are to maintain software that is already in use and does not require building from scratch but instead updating existing features, so we must learn such skills in an internship.
During this week's conversation with my mentor, we discussed the importance of proper code documentation for future software engineers who will need to understand my code to update certain features of the project I work on. Furthermore, my mentor told me about something called "being on call" which refers to a software engineer providing technical support for 24 hours, and the ability to understand code and debug it is an essential skill for this time.
Whenever I worked on my projects in classes, I never paid so much attention to code documentation like comments or commit messages like I am during my internship projects. I appreciate the fact that the code's quality is determined not only by its ability to run without breaking but also how adequately documented it is.
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