1 Simple and Important Lesson I Learned in My Summer SWE Internship
Few things are so easy yet have such a great impact down the line
My first exposure to programming came my freshman year of college. A bright-eyed kid sitting in the back of a stuffy lecture hall staring at that first Introduction to Programming & Problem-Solving in Java slide.
After introducing variables and their declarations, our professor devoted an entire section of the PowerPoint to variable and class naming; a seemingly trivial subject: how hard could it be to give a variable a name? If I need a variable to represent the current index of an array, just call it curIndex or something like that.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
As I scanned the room, it seemed my coding compatriots shared a similar blasé sentiment. If I had created a Student class in that moment with a member studentActivity String variable to describe what I saw, those values would include “Shopping”, “Memes”, and “Snoozefest”.
And it’s true, I didn’t really think much of variable naming in Java over the next two years. It seemed like a pretty simple…
