Back to Private School
18 Sep 2023
After completing sixth grade, my parents decided to enroll me into private school. At the time, it was a sort of exciting experience - there was always this idea I had about it being much better than my public school experiences. I anticipated meeting smarter classmates, and better quality teachers, and being in state-of-the-art classrooms. What I didn’t anticipate was a sudden change in dress code policy. Yep, I was required to wear a uniform to school now. And my shoes had to be black, and I had to wear a belt, although we had the option to buy our uniform shorts in a variety of colors - we were actually restricted to only wearing navy blue, forest green, and red shirts. Up until about a year ago, I never really thought about why uniforms at school were a thing. It really seemed trivial to me, but apparently we have some historical and cultural motivations for keeping them in schools.
How Conforming can Improve an Environment
I was specifically learning about Confucianism and Buddhism when I learned the significance of school uniforms. The ideas were simple and immediately made sense to me - basically uniforms promoted an overall sense of equality. Enforcing a strict dress code meant that no one could flaunt their wealth, or distract others with flashy or provocative clothes. This would minimize distractions, bullying, and various other opportunities for disrespect. And as someone having been in private school for at least six years, I can personally attest to that. The general idea is to promote an environment that nurtures learning and professionalism. When you put on the school uniform, you were a student of your chosen institution, first and foremost - or at least that was the intent of the dress code policy. One can still express their individuality through other means such as displaying skill at certain subjects or activities. But again, the uniform helps to highlight that this individual is a part of the school and works for more than just themself.
And all this talk about dress code brings me to coding standards. While its intent isn’t one-to-one identical to that of a strict dress code, they both accomplish the goal that individualism is minimized to a level that everyone is on the same team and a certain level of productivity is maintained.
My Exposure to Coding Standards
I was personally introduced to the idea of coding standards a little over a year ago, when I took the course Introduction to Computer Science. My professor brought up coding standards during the second or third week of classes, and had a concise document available for us to read so that we knew ahead of time what his expectations were for us in regards to assignments to be submitted. I recall that commenting was what he personally emphasized on when it came to grading - he really wanted us to comment on almost every single significant line of code in our programs. Why was this important? Well he explained that pretty early on too - if we work on a project with a team, it’s important that our team members understand what we are trying to accomplish with our code. Our professor provided very clear instructions on what our programs were supposed to output, but he wanted to put us in the habit of commenting because he felt that would be important moving forward. I tend to agree.
A Better Way to Address Coding Standards
Currently, coding standards are being enforced yet again, but through a combination of a coding style and an IDE plugin ESLint. This is different from what I experienced before as coding violations now appear as errors in the IDE (in my case IntelliJ IDEA). This is actually significant. In the past, I would have to scan my code to ensure my assignments adhered to the professor’s coding standards. The option to have the IDE display all the coding standard violations and provide an efficient means to navigate through each of them is an immense quality of life update to my usual programming routine. Furthermore, ESLint also provides suggestions on how to remedy any syntax errors I include in my code - this is a subtle, but important opportunity for me to further educate myself on how the language (JavaScript) is to be used correctly. So long as I am actively aware of what I type, and understanding why ESLint highlights what it does, I can improve my ability to use JavaScript, but also increase overall productivity.
That all said, my perspective on coding standards are only positive. Like my previous computer science professor explicitly addressed, our code needs to be readable if we expect to be a part of some larger workforce. Our peers need to understand what we are trying to accomplish with our code, and having clear and easy to read code makes everyone’s lives easier. I see coding standards in school as a means to prepare me for what’s ahead of me, but also a way to condition me into producing code that everyone can work with.