A Little Something for Everybody
29 Nov 2018
The “All Spark” of Coding
In the movie “Transformers”, the “All spark” is an object used on their home planet to create their version of “Life” as they know it. For Design Patterns, the concept is quite similar. From this object, they have a formula to create new beings and structures similar to themselves. For Design Patterns, we have the recipe to find the answer for a given problem similar to whatever structure is presented. For those of you that haven’t watched the movie, the rest of this reading should clear everything up, enjoy!
In a Nutshell. Sort of.
Design Patterns according to Wikipedia is in short, a “…reusable solution to a commonly occuring problem within a given context in software design”. So what does that mean exactly? For me, the first thing that comes to mind is a cause and effect chart, or a flowchart. There are various questions on the flow chart and depending on the answer to each question, a different solution is presented to the initial problem listed. In a sense, the solution that the design pattern can produce to the given problem is broadened and on a much larger scope than any specific set of solutions that are provided to a problem.
All Along
Like muscle memory, I’ve been exposed to Design Patterns this whole time, and they were right under my nose. Without even realizing it, taking ICS 314 under Professor Johnson created an environment where I was using Design Patterns the entire time. One of the larger homework assignments spread over a two week period that used design patterns to my understanding now would be “Digits”. Over the course of two weeks, through guidance from our professor, the entire class created a locally hosted web application to store contact information. The Model View Controller design pattern allowed us to restrict the view of certain content on the platform to only a select group of users, depending on the access that any given user was granted on the app.
Wrap Up
Design Patterns are kind of like all of the parts in your car that make it work. Even if you don’t know how they work, or what purpose it serves, the main takeaway is that it contributes to the overall functionality of your vehicle. Design Patterns also then exist within our daily lives through things that we may not even realize at first since they are probably things that we deem as trivial and take for granted. If you don’t get the movie reference by now, or if you simply haven’t connected the dots… The main takeaway here is that these patterns exist to serve the purpose of simplifying the way we find our answers to even the most trivial and most complicated of problems.