A Back to Front Approach to Design Patterns

For many beginning and intermediate software engineers, design is something of a secret anxiety. Often we know we can create something that works, and we can likely include a design pattern or two tif only to give our proposal some credibility. But sometimes, we're left with a nagging feeling that there might be a better design, or more appropriate pattern, and we might not be really confident that we can justify our choices.

This session investigates the fundamental driving factors behind good design choices so we can balance competing concerns and confidently justify why we did what we did. The approach presented can be applied not only to design, but also to what's often separated out under the term “software architecture”.
Along the journey, we'll use the approach presented to derive several of the well known “Gang of Four” design patterns, and in so doing conclude that they are the product of sound design applied to a context and not an end in themselves.

Course outline
Background: three levels of “design”
Data structure and algorithm
Design
Software Architecture
Why many programmers struggle with design
What makes a design “better” or “worse” than any other?
The pressures of the real world versus a learning environment
A time-honored engineering solution
Identifying the problem
Dissecting the elements
Creating a working whole from the parts
Deriving three core design patterns from principles
Decorator
Strategy
Sidenote, why traditional inheritance is bad
Command or “higher order function”

Setup requirements
This course is largely language agnostic, but does include some live coding demonstrations. Attendees will have access to the code that's created via a git repo. The majority of the examples will work in any version of Java from version 11 onwards. You can use any Java development environment / IDE that you like and no other tooling is required.

About Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts wrote his first program in 1978 in high school on punched cards. He started his career as a programmer building embedded control systems in a variety of assembly languages, C, and C++. Alongside programming, Simon taught part-time at a local college. In 1994 his career transitioned to full-time teacher and part time programmer, and he joined Sun Microsystems in 1995 where he worked until going independent in 2004

While at Sun he created training courses on a diverse range of Java topics, developed the original Sun Certified Java Programmer and Developer exams, and presented at JavaOne and other conferences on Java and Java performance topics.

Today, Simon is president of Dancing Cloud Services, LLC., based in Westminster Colorado, and he provides training, course development, and mentoring services in Java, Scala, JavaScript, Python, Go, along with design, and software architecture topics. Simon is equally comfortable offering training in classroom, recorded video, and live, remote-access, formats.

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