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1 year agoI loved my course on patterns. It was tough, but I now regularly feel like I can apply mastery of this tricky subject to my software projects. The course used a variety of techniques:
- Read the seminal Design Patterns book by Gamma et al., for an overview of the concepts.
- Every week, we’d incorporate three patterns into a preexisting XML processor project. My final one had like 25 patterns, which was challenging to keep working amidst refactoring. (You don’t have to do them cumulatively, but I enjoyed it.)
- We’d have to ask pattern-specific questions of our classmates in forum threads; and occasionally we’d be assigned to answer some.
- We each wrote up our own pattern. (I designed one based on my experiences handling data exchange between web apps and clients.)
Together, this taught us
- How the patterns could concretely look in practice.
- Pros, cons, and other considerations for each.
- Similaraties, differences, and nuances. (We’d joke that everything was the Template pattern if you squinted.)
- The impact of modifications to the patterns.
- How to recognize, create, hone, collaborate on, and share patterns.
I appreciate this approach because patterns are an inherently fuzzy subject.
As a longtime Plex user, I also hate their lack of focus and tendancy to priorotize bad features (like paid streaming and VR). But this one feels more like a way to re-focus on video by removing photo code from the main (video) app’s codebase, making it easier to maintain.