Design patterns can be defined as time-tested solutions, or problem solvers for recurring code problems. At You_Source, we love design patterns as they help us save time communicating about code, architecture, and they help reduce the time developers spend on understanding code (which, according to various studies, developers spend 20% up to 80% doing).
The decorator pattern is one of the easiest Gang of Four pattern to learn and is also one of the most useful. Using a decorator pattern, you can change the flow of an application dynamically without touching the current production (and tested) code. Except of course, where the object or abstraction is instantiated.
In this video we discuss the benefits of the decorator pattern, and show a practical example on how it can be implemented in C#. Since this video is part of our internal C# training program and material, we also made the cheat sheet available which shows you the code used in this video, but also how easy it is to isolate the class in test code.
We will be posting more videos of very basic implementations of the other Gang of Four patterns in the future. If you have preferences which one to do first, please leave them in the comments!
Download the cheatsheet here
Mobile-Friendly Sign UpIt may seem like a small improvement, but displaying the right keyboard to a user can help ease friction on sign up, and make the whole process faster and more pleasant.
Taking Your Craft SeriouslyAlthough it is easily overlooked, being a software engineer comes with a great responsibility. According to Robert C Martin, a regular new car comes with 100 million lines of code, where he jokingly adds ‘written by a 22-year-old at 3 o’clock in the morning’. It scares him, and if you are tech savvy I am sure you share that opinion. Although funny – this is NOT a joke—being a software engineer does put you in situations where you write code at 3 in the morning for a piece of software that affect the lives or at least the livelihood of people.
Vertical Rhythm in Your CSSTypography and typesetting form the foundation by which your whole user interface stand on. For a designer, everything else—color, art direction—is relative to the intention of the product owner. It’s very malleable. The one thing that should be unbendable is the system by which the letters are laid out on the page. If it’s not solidly built, it can grow bloated and unwieldy. Small changes that would usually take less than an hour to apply, would take double—or even triple—the development time. The size of your file can also double than how it normally would be, and that’s not good for performance. On the other hand, if it’s not the code that doesn’t suffer, it’s the legibility that takes a hit. The vertical rhythm gets compromised in ways that can easily tire the eye of the user.
