What can we learn from other design disciplines? How do they learn design? What can we copy from them? This is a challenge for software developers to start thinking as code designers, as people who use code as a material to prototype solutions to problems.

1. Journey to Master Code Design
Featuring original, not very good drawings by @alexboly
And the mandatory lolcatz

2. Remember the last time you enjoyed programming

3. What is good design and
why it matters?
This is a sequel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGJwPiIOf_8

5. How many of you design code?
How many of you design other things (UI, UX,
visual …)?
How many of you know designers from other
domains?

7. Perspective 1
We solve problems.
Most times we use code,
because it’s the
“prototyping” material we
know best
Perspective 2
We can learn from other
designers and design
practices: UX, industrial
design, service design,
visual design etc.
Perspective 3
Design is an old
discipline.
We can learn from its
tradition and practices

8. We will focus beyond
● Clean code
● SOLID principles
● TDD
● DDD
● 4 Elements of Simple Design
● Naming

9. How I designed 17 years ago

10. How I usually design today

11. Hidden assumption

12. Intuition ~= Satisficing

13. How do other designers design?

14. How I Learned Software Design
I haz made
mistakes

15. How do other designers learn
design?
● Design studies
● Design school

16. What if ...
We can haz
same for us!

17. How do you make design decisions?

18. Driver – Documenter
Driver writes all code
Documenter asks questions and builds a
decision map

20. Design Studies

24. Louis XVI chair, neoclassicism

25. The NV45 chair, Finn Juhl, 1945

26. The two-part shell chair, Hans J. Wegner, 1963

27. The Bow chair, Grete Jalk, 1963

28. Panton chair, 1960- Modernism

29. Moku chair, Cecilie Manz, 2016

30. Jake Cress – Animated furniture

32. Design Studies
Take a problem
Implement multiple solutions
Take these solutions further than a kata

33. Two types of design studies
● Compare specific techniques
– Immutable code vs. mutable code
– Single thread vs. concurrent
– Functional vs. OOP
● Compare different design qualities
– Performance vs. changeability vs. scalability vs.
security

34. Let’s see examples!
https://codedesigner.eu/

35. Pacman & Property based
testing
Constraints: immutability, pure functions, no nulls
https://github.com/alexboly/pacmanKataPropertyBasedGroovy/

36. Pacman C++

37. Church encoding C++
https://github.com/alexboly/ChurchEncodingCpp
Constraints:
Everything as
function
Great for exploring
functional support in
multiple languages

38. Composability
`
https://github.com/alexboly/composabilityDesignStudy

39. React State Design Study
https://hackernoon.com/the-react-state-museum-a278c726315

40. Self-contained processes as
microservices
https://github.com/MozaicWorks/SelfContainedProcessesAsMicroservicesDesignStudy

41. Idea: XML Parser
● Subset of features
● Design quality constraints:
– Optimize memory
– Optimize speed
– Optimize processing of large files
– Changeability: easily add another element type
● Compare your implementations with existing
ones

42. Idea: Database engine
● Features: multiple types, can read, update,
delete data; no SQL support
● Possible quality constraints:
– Fast reads / fast writes
– Parallel access
– Changeability: easily add another type
● Compare with mysql, postgresql etc.

43. Idea: Tetris game
● Full featured
● Design qualities ideas:
– Changeability: plug in different interfaces: console,
opengl, 2d graphics, web, etc.
– Performance: measure and optimize fps

44. More ideas for design studies:
https://github.com/MozaicWorks/SoftwareDesignStudies

45. Software Design Schools
Workshops on techniques
+
Design Studies
+
Community

47. Recap

49. https://leanpub.com/usablesoftwaredesign