As a Capstone Senior Design project my team is building an ROV......we are all Mechanical Engineers with no robotic experience making the programming difficult.
I find it hard to believe that your doing your culminating project with no experience in programming any kind of computer.
The final code will have named pins.
Why doesn't THIS code? Correcting bad habits later is much harder than learning good habits to start with. You've been told what you should do. The correct response is "I'll fix that right away", not "but that's not my problem".