I have been saying a bunch of things, repeating what others say, mostly, but never actually internalised what they really meant. After a week with Fred George and Tom Scott I have seen the light in some way. I have seen proof of the efficacy of pair programming, I have seen the value of fast red-green-refactor cycles and most importantly I have learnt just how much I don’t know.

This was an Object Bootcamp developed by Fred George and Deliberate and basically consisted of problem solving in pairs going over various patterns and OO design in general, pointing out various code smells to look out for and how to refactor your way out of trouble. The course packed in as much as the team could take over the course of the week and is highly recommended. Our finest OO developers in the team still learned new things over the week and the rest of us learned even more.

Where to go from here? I use this blog as a way to write down things I learn so I can reference it later. My fanbase tends to stick to my posts about NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC 3 or something from several years ago, so I need not worry about making things fresh and interesting for the readership. The general recommended reading list that came off of this week reads as follows:

• Gang of four
• Refactoring – Improving the design of existing code
• Refactoring to Patterns
• Analysis Patterns

So, GoF and Refactoring – no shockers, eh? We have them in our library and I’ve even read them, even though I first read some other derivative book on design patterns back in the day, but obviously there are things that didn’t quite take the first time. I guess I was too young. Things make so much more sense now when you have a catalogue of past mistakes to cross-reference against various patterns.

The thing is, what I hadn’t internalised properly is how evil getters and setters are. I had some separation of concerns in terms of separating database classes from model classes, but still the classes didn’t instantiate good objects, they were basically just bags of data, and mediator classes had business logic, messing with other classes data instead of proper objects churning cleanly.

Encapsulating information in the system is crucial. It is hard to do correctly, but by timeboxing the time from red to green you force yourself to build the next simplest clean thing before you continue. There is no time for gold plating, and boy you veer off and try something clever only to realise that you needed to stop and go back. Small changes. I have written this so many times before, but if you do it properly it really works.  I have seen JB Rainsberger and Greg Young talk about this, and I have nodded and said sure. Testify! “That would be nice to get to do in practice” was my thinking. And then I added getters and setters to my classes. Or at least made them anemic by having a constructor with parameters and then getters, used by demigod classes. The time to make a change is yesterday, not tomorrow.

So, yes. Analysis Patterns is a hard read, said Fred. Well, then. It seems extremely interesting. I think Refactoring to Patterns will be the very next thing I read, but then I will need to take a stab at it.

I need to learn where patterns could get rid of code smells, increase encapsulation and reduce complexity.

There is a handy catalogue of refactorings that I already have a shortcut to in the chrome toolbar. It gets a lot more clicks now, but in general I will not make any grand statements now but rather come back with a post showing results.