Essays

Final Project Proposal

01 Apr 2026

Bow-lletins: A Digital Bulletin Board for UH Mānoa UH Mānoa is a large campus with a lot happening at any given time. There are club meetings, study groups, internship opportunities, campus jobs, volunteer events, scholarship deadlines, and community announcements constantly...

UHM

Software Engineering Was Never Just About Websites

12 May 2026

More Than Just Building Websites When I first entered ICS 314, I honestly thought software engineering was mostly going to be about learning how to build websites. I expected to spend the semester learning frontend design, React components, databases, and...

ethics reflection software engineering

Effort Estimation and Tracking Reflection

12 May 2026

Throughout this project, effort estimation became one of the most important parts of managing our workflow. At first, I assumed estimating effort would mostly just involve guessing how long coding tasks would take. However, over time, I realized that software...

estimation debugging Best Practices idpm

Ctrl + S Before It Breaks: AI in ICS 314

12 May 2026

I. Introduction Artificial Intelligence has become almost impossible to avoid in education, especially in computer science and software engineering. Whether it is helping students debug code, explain concepts, generate examples, or organize ideas, AI tools are changing how people learn...

ChatGPT reflection

Patterns That Build!

23 Apr 2026

When people first hear the phrase design patterns, it can sound more intimidating than it really is. The word “design” makes it feel formal, and the word “pattern” can make it sound like something rigid or mechanical. But patterns are...

Patterns System Design Creativity in Computing

Confessions of a Bootstrap Beginner!

27 Feb 2026

Why UI Frameworks Are Worth the Climb UI frameworks are not simple. The first time you open the documentation for Bootstrap, it becomes obvious that this is more than just “some CSS classes.” There are grids, breakpoints, and containers, rows,...

UI Frameworks Bootstrap 5 Web Development Frontend Development HTML

Beyond Curly Braces

12 Feb 2026

Most people think coding standards are about small, almost trivial things: how many spaces to indent, whether to use single or double quotes, or where to place the closing curly brace. I used to think the same thing. After one...

ESLint Coding Standards Best Practices Clean code

Building Systems with Purpose

29 Jan 2026

My interest in software engineering is still developing, but it has been shaped by hands-on projects that have shown me how complex and thoughtful the field really is. Rather than feeling confident in any one specialty, I am motivated by...

Computer Science TypeScript Programming

Reflecting on Smart Questions in Software Engineering

29 Jan 2026

Effective communication is one of the most important skills for a software engineer to develop, and Eric Raymond’s essay How to Ask Questions the Smart Way makes it clear that the quality of technical help a developer receives depends heavily...

Computer Science Stackoverflow Q & A

TypeScript Between Safety and Speed

23 Jan 2026

Learning a new programming language often feels less like starting from zero and more like learning a new accent. The ideas are familiar, but the rules, syntax, and expectations shift just enough to slow you down. My experience with TypeScript...

Computer Science TypeScript Programming