The Journey to Master Code Design

Making software that works is typically not enough. Once it works and it’s successful, you need to keep changing it until the day it’s retired. To allow the software to be “soft” and adapt to the needs of its users, the structure of the code matters immensely.

But how do programmers decide to structure the code? Intuition? Familiarity? Stack Overflow? Isn’t there a better way?

This problem has fascinated me for years. To answer it, I’ve learned about other design disciplines: industrial design, graphical design, UX design etc. This quest has continuously brought new insights and has led to many experiments about how we could design software better.

In this session I will discuss ideas such as:

• The fundamental problem of software development
• The general design process, how it matches software design and what we’re missing
• Even the simplest problem has hundreds of solutions when programming
• Software design is not absolutely good or bad – it’s fit or unfit for its purpose
• Feedback is the most important part of design improvement
• Your design sense needs training – and we can use “Software Design Studies” to train it
• How design schools work and why you should be interested in one