Up to my eyeballs
posted in General |I don’t remember if I mentioned it; but I’ve garnered another “client.” — Full time working for a big website, with three other contracted programmers and a system admin. I’m also reading Joel at Reddit trying to get programming/business tips, because I made Arghwebworks more of an official business.
Shane and other non-technical types, keep reading, I won’t get too deep. 
I keep seeing references to this book, “Design Patterns” by a group called the Gang of Four. I’ve been coding in PHP for over six years now, and I don’t consider myself “too bad” when it comes to Object Oriented programming. I can see it, recognise it, and even do it.
But holee-crap. I started reading about different patterns of Object Oriented Programming, things like ‘singletons’ and ‘factory methods’ and ‘visitors’ … and suddenly my vision blurred, the desk slid sideways and tilted to the left and my cheek was pressed against the floor. Reading these descriptions is like being plunged back into college and Philosophy courses where Kant or Wittgenstein are using language in a way I’m not really ready to read.
I’m missing a whole layer of understanding that I need to grok what they’re saying in the book. And as it happens, my Object Oriented code isn’t really all that object-oriented; it’s just a bunch of old-style (procedural) code wrapped up and pretending to be object oriented. I think. I don’t really “get it” but I think that’s accurate :S.
I’m not saying I suck or anything- some of my code is pretty decent. Nice even. But this whole ‘design patterns’ thing is really … flexing my brain in a way I haven’t experienced since college. Fifteen years ago.
