Design Patterns, but not for decorating
25 Apr 2024What is a Design really?
When I think about design patterns, I imagine intricate fractals or pleasing geometric shapes. But fundamentally, design patterns are just common or helpful methods of creating something. This concept applies to almost every aspect of society, and software development is no exception. In software engineering, design patterns are established techniques for ensuring proper functionality in a project. For example, when developing a Meteor application, it’s quite common to rely on components to build various pages. Although using components isn’t strictly necessary for the application to work, integrating them greatly enhances code readability, simplifies future maintenance, and offers more flexibility. Components are just one aspect of design patterns in software development, some others include modular programming, React.js, server-side rendering, container patterns, and many many more. Personally, I have found that following these industry standards makes it much easier to understand how my application functions, and allows for much easier maintenance and updating.
Project Portal Hawaii
While writing this, I am well underway into the largest scale group project that I have been a part of, Project Portal Hawaii. Working with four other team members can be difficult at times if everyone is not on the same page. Throughout the creation of this project, my team and I have followed established guidlines for successfully working collaboratively. Although thinking of good communication as a design pattern is a bit abstract, I beliveve the way you design your channels of communication and form excpectations of one another are extremely important aspects of sucessfully creating a full scale application. Besides good communication, we have also utilized modular programming by seperating different functionality of our application into distinct folders and files. We have implemented components using Meteor, used publish/subscribe methods of accessing data in collections, utilizing route based splitting when switching between pages, and many more. The modularity of components especially makes making changes very simple and easily replicated across different parts of the application.
Why is this all important?
Design patterns are incredibly important for successful software development. They provide a developer, or a team of developers, the ability to ensure readability, modularity, flexibility, scalability, and maintainability. I feel proud to use these well established design patterns, because I feel like the code I am writing can easily be expanded upon and improved without too much of a headache trying to figure out what I was attempting to accomplish. This makes me feel like I am building good habits and learning best practices that will help me throughout my career as a software engineer.