Recipes for Reliable Code
05 Dec 2024
Cooking Up Consistency
In a busy kitchen, cooks are expected to consistently prepare and cook dishes that taste good for each customer. These cooks don’t have the time to completely reinvent every overder, but they do have recipes from the business that they must follow that have previously had success many times before and therefore are of high quality consistently. This is also similar to how software engineers use design patterns to create efficient and clean code with already existing blueprints to follow. Like the recipes in a restaurant, design patterns give reliable solutions that help developers work through problems. They can be adapted to different challenges because they aren’t completely rigid, almost a bit like those unique recipe modification requests in a restaurant for “no onions” or “no peanuts”. In the same way these recipes make sure that there are consistent high quality dishes coming out of the kitchen, design patterns help a developer write code that has high standards of readability, scalability, and maintainability.
Signature Dishes: Singleton and Observer Patterns
A design pattern, for example, is the singleton pattern, which is a lot like a restaurant’s unique, exclusive dish recipe. Per the name, there is only a single instance, which avoids confusion and inconsistent code by avoiding multiple conflicting instances. I’ve previously been able to use the Observer pattern for our final project, a study spots application. This pattern keeps the UI in sync with user actions, so whenever a user tries to update their search criteria or apply different filters via advanced search, the search results change dynamically.
Another thing that design patterns do is save time and avoid errors. In a kitchen, anyone with the correct training can efficiently work on dishes together because they all have knowledge of the same recipes and methods. This goes the same for design patterns and software engineering, because developers are able to rely on the same solutions, which makes it easier to collaborate on projects in a team.
Conclusion: The Recipe for Success in Software Design
When looking back on the code that I’ve written, I see how these design patterns improved the reliability and ease of updating the projects, even if I didn’t even realize what they were at the time of creating them. Just like a busy restaurant, these design patterns or recipes give developers something to use while working on unique problems with existing strategies and solutions. These are important to any software developer’s toolkit for success in software design.