Gifted Slacker

Main Idea:

I’ve been reading a lot of coverage of tech conferences lately. Something distressing occurred to me the other day: At most conferences, all of this specialized, and perhaps not-well-known, knowledge only goes as far as the auditorium in which it’s presented.

Conference summaries abound, but those are poor substitutes for the information communicated during a presentation. A few conferences post video, audio, and slides of many of their sessions. This is great and I hope more and more conferences start to see the value in clueing-in all of the interested non-attendees.

Sideline:

I never had an in-depth class on object oriented theory or practice in college. We were introduced to the basic concepts in a very hands off manner, with no practical advice on applying them.

This hasn’t mattered much to me in the past. My first programming job was for Lotus Notes applications, which don’t require much design beyond gluing black boxes together. After that I moved to the .NET team and worked on the most un-OO, kludgily designed web application ever.¹

So for most of my professional career I’ve been using this odd, hybrid programming style (think C-style modularization with sporadic bouts of pseudo-OO). The past is past and understanding OOP is crucial to me now that I’m programming so many new languages and frameworks.

What am I doing to learn how to apply OO design principles?

I got copies of the original Gang of Four Design Patterns book and Design Patterns in Ruby. First I read about a pattern and study the practical example in DPiR and then I go read about the same pattern in the GoF book. Going from practical to theoretical seems to be the way my brain works best.

Early on in this process a light went on about why OO is such a big deal. I always “knew” why, in that this-is-what-teachers-tell-me-so-I’ll-go-along-with-it way. Now I get it.

After I crank out some words for my dissertation, I’ll be tucking in to the observer pattern. I can’t wait.

1. To a great extent, this wasn’t so much the fault of the development team as it was the management directive that it mirror our Lotus Notes applications in design and function.