Don’t listen to the so called experts

It seems lately that there are a number of OOP “experts” coming out of the woodworks preaching the design pattern goodness. I’m fine with the design patterns, in fact I use them on a day to day basis. It’s the, don’t overuse strategy, that I hate being preached to design pattern beginners. This brings about a fear of using them. I say, “Use them!”. That’s how we learn. Of course we’ll misuse new technologies when we’re learning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying, “make the solution fit the problem”. That’s not the solution either, but with someone that is new to design patterns, you need to try them in different situations. You need to fuck up for yourself. This is how I learned quite a bit of programming and procedures. Not everything should be learned from what others preach because someone who has a soapbox at the moment says so.

Try implementing in your day to day work. This is what work is for, learning. Your boss may think it’s to get project A done, but he’s wrong. It’s to always learn new skills and evolve. Else he should sit at his typewriter and snail mail his rebuttal. I’ve shoehorned patterns into simplistic problems that could’ve done without a formal OOP pattern. Definitely overkill, but along the way I’ve learned to find a balance that has helped tremendously with larger scale items. It’s like learning algebra for the first time. You may know what 10 – x = 3 is without balancing the equation, but the point is to learn the procedure. So when bigger problems come along that can’t be done in your head, we can use what we’ve learned to solve them.

You can go back and cleanup. Whenever I revisit my code for adding features or fixing bugs, I usually apply what I’ve learned since then and do some spring cleaning.

Tagged as: php