Great article on Data Objects by @pcreux
This self-documentation is a great gift for other developers (and your future-self). A quick look at the Data Object definition tells us what attributes are available. No need to go…
![Sri Yantra Mandala (By N.Manytchkine (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)](https://i0.wp.com/avdi.codes/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1024px-Sri_Yantra_256bw.gif?resize=1000%2C750&ssl=1)
Patterns are for People
There’s a meme, originating from certain corners of the Functional side of programming, that “patterns are a language smell”. The implication being that “good” languages either already encode the patterns as…
Active Record Soup
Once upon a time there was a small but prosperous village. This village had a reputation for being tech-centric. It was populated mainly by enterprise consultants, software architects, and agile coaches. The…
Modeling the World with Prototypes
This post started out as the second half of an article on prototype-based OO design for Gregory Brown’s Practicing Ruby. For an introduction to the prototyped view of the object…
DisplayCase Gem Now Available
Announcing the display_case gem, an implementation of the Exhibit pattern described in (and extracted from) “Objects on Rails”.
Making Little Classes out of Big Ones (video)
I recently visited the Hashrocket offices in Jacksonville, and while I was there I did a Lunch & Learn talk on the topic of of breaking down too-big classes into…
Decoration is best, except when it isn’t
I think by now we all know to prefer composition over inheritance. But in a language with a lot of options, what’s the best kind of composition to use? Composing…
SBPP #4: method Cascades
In Smalltalk, you can “cascade” side-effectful calls to the same object using the semicolon (;) operator. E.g.: If I understand it correctly, the semicolon is effectively a K-combinator or “Kestrel”….
SBPP #3: Reversing Method
I’m pleased to find Kent Beck shares my affinity for methods with a consistent cadence. In the next pattern I translate, he looks for a way to bring a uniform…
SBPP #2: Smalltalk Patterns in Ruby
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns continues from the introduction with a brief explanation of patterns. Some notable quotes: About leveraging commonality: “large-scale software re-use has not proven to be the answer”….