Tag: design

A confluence of business trends and development best practices is changing the way developers need to think about building applications. For want of a better term, the mindset that most software developers follow when building applications might be called ‘systems thinking’: Design a database that holds the data the company needs, design the software components […]

Writing clearly and effectively is difficult — in fact, there’s no chance that you’ll get it right the first time….which is why you get to rewrite. Rewriting isn’t about fixing your mistakes, rewriting is about adding excellence. Here’s a three-part plan for doing rewriting right.My buddy Mal Stiefel once said he was never at a loss for words […]

There is a persistent myth that Agile Design is an oxymoron as there is no place for design in Agile; that our design and architecture will magically emerge as we code. This opinion is a natural reaction against the waterfall Big Design Up Front (BDUF) mentality. However it is a false and even dangerous opinion. […]

Back in September, I wrote about the strategy design pattern and suggested that it could be useful in iPhone and iPad programming to provide alternate implementations of a piece of functionality. When thinking about strategy, think “plugin”. Strategy implies a relationship between classes where a class has a strategy object to do specific work. In […]

I was over in Sweden last week teaching a Java design patterns course. Having spent so much time with iOS recently, it was interesting to put my Java hat back on and talk about designing enterprise scale applications. Some of my students probably thought I was a little slow writing code during demos but I […]