What Are Design Patterns?

Key Takeaways

hello everybody my name is kyle from web dev simplified in this video i'm going to be talking about what design patterns are and why they're useful as a primer for my upcoming series on design patterns to get started with what design patterns are I'm going to read the Wikipedia definition for design patterns because I think it encapsulates what design patterns are quite well it reads software design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design design patterns are formalized best practices that the programmer can use to solve common problems when designing an application or system and I think this is a great definition for what a design pattern is because it hits the heads that it's general in which it means that can be applied to multiple different aspects of your software design whether you're designing a game a website a mobile application it doesn't really matter these patterns can be applicable to almost any form of application you're creating and it also mentions that they're reusable which means that you can use them throughout your application many different times in many different scenarios and use the same pattern which is really useful because then you only need to learn the pattern once in order to reuse it many different places across your applications and then it also says that this is really a formalization of different best practices which i think is the best way to explain design patterns because they're really just a formal written way in order to do something that is a normal best practice inside of software design so there's many different patterns to do many different things and it's taken brilliant minds from tons of different people that have come together and said this is the best way that we have in order to do this problem in the cleanest way possible and that's really what design patterns are for but for making your own code cleaner to use read and less buggy and less error-prone than if you weren't using these design patterns to begin with and luckily learning design patterns is a fairly straightforward and easy thing to do the actual process of learning the design patterns is much easier than learning when you should use them and where you should use them I know the biggest problem that most people have when using design patterns is that they learn about them and they're like wow this is amazing uses all over the places will make my coach so much cleaner and they start throwing design patterns into areas where they don't really need to be over they don't really fit or it may be overkill and we're not using it would be better I know when I first learned about design patterns that was exactly what I did I was like wow these are really amazing they made my coach so much cleaner so much easier to write I'm going to throw them everywhere and that's what I did everything I wrote for a while after that was just using design patterns all over the place where I didn't really need them and I made my code messier than if I hadn't used these design patterns in the first place and this is kind of a problem because that's really what the design patterns are there to solve is to make your code less messy and cleaner so learning when to use them is really the hard thing when it comes to learning design patterns this problem that occurs where people end up using design patterns where they're not meant to be used or overly using design patterns where they shouldn't be is some of the reason that design patterns kind of get a bad rep in the industry and where people say you shouldn't be using design patterns there overkill most of the time and they are sometimes right I do agree that sometimes design patterns are overkill but knowing these design patterns is more important because it allows you to have a holistic view of how to create cleaner more reusable code rather than just throwing something together that works I kind of view design patterns is almost like a gate rate drug that leads into you creating more and more clean code and wanting to learn about all these different ways to architect code and more reusable and cleaner ways that will make your application easier to maintain in the long run and quicker to maintain as you go forward adding new features I know for me design patterns were really that thing that pushed me to want to create cleaner and more maintainable code and so I think that by doing this I will hopefully be able to impart on to you guys that same desire for clean and all architected code that I got from winning design patterns and I really hope that my videos can give that to you guys as well so my next video is going to be on the null object design pattern which in my opinion is probably the easiest of all the design patterns to understand and one of the more useful ones to see why you would want to use this over not using it so I think it's a great starting point for you guys to learn about design patterns so you make sure you check that video out when it comes out thank you guys very much for watching this quick video on what design patterns are and why they're useful it's really quite easy to wrap your head around what design patterns are and it is incredibly useful going forward as a developer throughout the rest of your career to have these design patterns in your back pocket to use when needed and just the idea of thinking about maintainable and reusable code will be infinitely useful going forward so with that I hope you guys have a good day thank you