Saturday, September 25, 2010

Redesigns to Blow Your Mind

Since I last posted, I have become gainfully employed by a web development company and have been so for the past 8 months or so. Both the Master's degree and the move down here seems to have paid off even more so than I had any right to hope or expect. Always a good story.

In the meantime, I've become motivated to start working on a few personal projects again, primarily so I can keep the rust off my not-spectacular Java skills. Syntax is trivial, but it surprises me how easy it is to lose code design skills. In particular, I started a project with (apparently) the intention of using some sort of mediator pattern and, after not working on it for a few months, looking over the code again has made me cringe. The objects are working as both data containers AND UI controllers, which, due to the recent emphasis of MVC, and my own personal preference, seems like a Really Bad Idea(tm). So already, with not much code, I'm doing an overhaul.

None of this is particularly enthralling, but it again illustrates how important a design phase before code writing can be, even if you're the only person working on the project. I'm ditching 7 source files due to a complete lack of planning when I started...if there was any planning, I certainly can't find it now.

So, back to coding, and I hope to have a few functioning projects to write about soon.