Design Patterns & Anti-Patterns

Design patterns are efficient and elegant solutions to common problems. They provide a prescriptive solution to typical problems.

They can improve the efficiency of teams and the consistency of the code.

Anti-patterns are the antithesis of design patterns. They inefficient and ineffective patterns often used by new developers and more senior developers.

Some examples:

Software design:

• Input kludge: not handling sketchy input
• Interface bloat: making the interface too powerful causing it to be difficult to use
• Race hazard: not seeing how different orders of events will be handled

OO:

• Circular dependency: uneccassary dependencies between objects
• God objects: object that has too responsibility

Programming:

• Hard coding: assumptions hard coded into the system
• Magic numbers
• Magic strings

Methodical:

• Copy and paste
• Reinventing the wheel