Day One.

Mostly admin today, but importantly I had the chance to sit down with my mentors. Uku and Mateo will be guiding me through the next 6 months.

I had my first Zagaku today, led by Cedric who was talking about Design Patterns, specifically three:

  • Adapter Pattern - Useful for abiding by OCP, especially when you cannot change an interface but need to behave differently.
  • Decorator Pattern - The example here was coffee orders, the decorator pattern was used for ordering coffee with specific requirements, each time a new drink component was added, the decorator pattern was used, so “soy milk” was added through a decorator pattern. Further investigation needed on this one, I’m not sure what the benefit is here in using this pattern.
  • Facade Pattern - I understand an API to be the best example of this pattern. And interface to allow others access to low level parts of your system, but still giving you control over what they can do with it.

I had a great chat with Uku and Mateo about my approach to the apprenticeship and the challenges that I will face given the way I work. My first obstacle is of my own making, and it is related to how like to make sure things are “perfect”. The proportion of my time spent “perfecting” things over just getting them working, is likely to be a hinderence to my ability to try things. This is probably why I’ve never started to code any of my “ideas”, I get to wrapped up in the planning stage trying to get it perfect and make sure I get it right first time, that I never actually build anything. So the current tactic, at least with the blog initially is to engineer it so that it’s not feasible to perfect every post, what is more important is getting used to writing, so I will be doing a post every day until further notice.

The longer term lessons then will be:

Don’t try and make it perfect. Make it work, make it clean, then move on.

Don’t try and plan it to perfection from the start, just start building, and go from there. This will also require me to get comfortable with me deleting my own code…