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by JaggerJo 1671 days ago
agree. I’ve inherited codebases from new “architects” who seemingly have just read GoF.
2 comments

I've met such newly appointed architects myself - judging by the commit history, they were OK writing unmantainable spaghetti for 10 years, then they read a few books on patterns, got promoted to architects and started applying those patterns everywhere (ending up with unmaintainable overengineered abstractions). When arguing during architecture reviews, you'd often hear "but in book X it's written that..." like they don't have their own opinion. Fortunately, they all outgrew this phase and eventually became proper architects.
Haha I remember my first designs as a Jr Engineer after I had crammed the book into my brain before starting. I’m pretty sure the other devs just threw those classes into the trash when I wasn’t looking. For about a year I thought everything had to be a design pattern and making a vanilla class was a faux pas. 14 years later I don’t think I use any of the patterns anymore. Maybe facade if I’m refactoring a complete mess of a project
My thought about this is that patterns are something I recognize in the completed code, not something I bake into my code. A useful tool for refactoring at best. But re-factoring, not factoring. :)