What was the most significant thing you learned this term in CSC290 so far? Your answer should be specific and your blog post should be focused. Don’t write about what you learned in general. Pick the most significant thing. The most significant thing you learned does not have to be related to communication skills or course topics. The most significant thing you learned can be something you learned on your own, in tutorial, through related research, etc. What you learned could be something about communication skills, about your learning style, about your organizational skills, about the tech industry, etc.
The most significant thing I learned this term in CSC290 is UML. As much as I hate UML, I can see its importance. UML is used in many tech related businesses to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML has changed my perspective on how I should approach my projects. I realized that I have a great lack of documentation for both high level and low level functionality of all my personal projects and lacks critical thinking. When creating a project, it may be a great idea to create a UML diagram that documents (visualize) the high level functionality in the system instead of just writing code without any thinking. I often just write code without any thought and add features as I code. A lack of planning consumes too much time figuring what to do and causes the code to be very messy. In addition, documenting the workflows of the system is extremely important not only due to it being more efficient in time and writing better code, you can also figure out any logical problems in your system. UML allows both the coder and the client to analyze visually any logical problem that may exist in your system rather than going through each line of code trying to debug the program. Therefore, planning out before coding is a great way to work on projects since you can avoid many restraints and potential problems that may arise later on. From personal experience at a company, my supervisor really loved UML diagrams. Since he is not an avid programmer, he would love to ask students to create UML diagrams to allow him understand what the program does and analyze any potential problems there could be in the program. Whether or not you are an avid programmer, UML allows people to quickly understand what the system does. UML diagrams has allowed me to learn what the program does and explain to my supervisor of any questions he had on a system that was written by a student in the past.