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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I 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.