LJC Event - Trisha Gee's Design Talk

Tonight I managed to attend an awesome talk by Trisha Gee entitled: What do you mean, backwards compatibility?

Overall I found the talk to be a fantastic insight into software design and has inspired me to read into a load of other topics :)

Lessons

• Setting "Design Goals" gives you good guidance without being overly prescriptive.
• Remember good design is supposed to help you produce good code.
• An example is immutability, it is good design for achieving the goal of thread safe code. 
• "Design is a Process, not an Artefact"
• Design documentation is supposed to enable good change, i.e. UML can highlight concepts that need to be readdressed.
• However documentation is out of date as soon as it is written, code should be self descriptive and design should stand out.
• Great API design has "User Empathy"
• You heard of achieving high performance though "Mechanical Sympathy", well now we have the "User Empathy" too ;) Heard it here first :P

Further Reading

• Domain Driven Design - aren't we doing this already? I need to read more!
• Fluent Interfaces - this is more than just method chaining, can this be used outside of building?
• Strategy Pattern - not something I used much but potentially very useful, too many if statements!
• Behaviour Driven Development - So this is all the TDD practices I've been learning without knowing it? Awesome! I want to learn this properly!

Feedback

• Finally some feedback on Trisha's actual talk...
• The talk could do with a stronger introduction and focus more on design, it isn't really focussed on the MongoDB Java Driver and I don't think that is a bad thing!
• Really love the Monsters/Safe Houses analogy, gave really good structure to the talk and it is a beautifully simple analogy. 

Programming Goals

Recently I have been trying to improve myself as a programmer and all round software engineer. As a part of this, I joined the London Java Community and I've been attending various meet-ups.

All my recent exploits will have to wait have to wait for another post but I just wanted to list my goals for all of this. In this way, it will be clear in my head in the very least!

Really understand Java and the JVM

• Gain a better insight to how my Java code translates to byte-code.
• Learn more about how the JVM runs.
• Fully understand garbage collection, along with the G1 collector.
• Get to grips with tuning the JVM.

Become an expert in performance optimisation

• Learn how to truly measure performance on a macro and micro level.
• Understand the techniques necessary to produce faster code.
• Be fully aware of all the external factors which affect performance, such as I/O and network latency.
• Learn more algorithms and use more in anger.

Better manage and estimate time

• Be able to provide accurate quotes for concrete deliverables.
• Understand the techniques to estimate for intangible/vague software requirements.
• Better plan out work to reduce risk/maximise productivity!

Become a software design guru!

• Weave the right software design patterns into all my code.
• Avoid anti-patterns!
• Make all my code simple, robust and scalable (as necessary).

Be better at testing

• Find a practical testing framework/methodology given volatile requirements and highly limited timeframes.
• Better express user expectations as some form of user interface tests.
• Improve general code coverage!

Adopt a proper release management methodology

• Find or come up with a good version number standard!
• Set up some form of "One-click" deployment

Start benefitting from Continuous Integration 

• Properly set up CI environment to monitor and analyse code.
• Leverage CI in other practices, such as possibly exploring Feature Branching...

So seven main areas! Obviously this isn't all going to happen overnight but I really hope to achieve all these goals in the near future... It is all just a matter of time and patience I suppose!