[zwieback]

I remember first hearing about Uncle Bob's principles and the GoF patterns in a lunch meeting a company in town (Rogue Wave Software) held for anyone interested. When I heard those guys talking about object oriented design and system architecture in general I could just listen in awe. This was before the AbstractFactoryFactory antipattern (Java was just starting) and I thought if I could just gain the level of understanding the RW guys had I'd be golden.

15 years later I've written enough software to understand the principles but no amount of study got me there, just lots of practice and fixing my own mistakes.