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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

My New Favorite Software Pattern

Published 11 months ago • 2 min read

Team-Driven Developer

A newsletter with tips and tools for building software as a team

My New Favorite Coding Pattern

Engineers love patterns.
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Why? Patterns help us apply known solutions to novel problems, allowing us to reuse knowledge instead of reinventing the proverbial wheel.
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And while I think many engineers lean on patterns more than they ought to, there are patterns worth knowing that can make your life as an engineer much easier.
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Today, I'm sharing a new pattern I've been discovering and tinkering with to help write simple and declarative code.

Team Building Exercise

For Team Building this week, let's ask a simple question:
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What problems do we seem to solve repeatedly in our code?

I've found this a better question to help determine the patterns needed in a codebase. Don't chase patterns to implement; chase down problems to solve.
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Then, think critically about how you might solve those common problems. It might not be that you grab your favorite patterns book or look at Refactoring Guru for hours. Instead, try to think critically about the problems. Make sure you really understand them and make sure they are actually the right problems to solve, too.
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Then—and only then!—consider how you might abstract those problems away with the appropriate patterns.

As you do, make sure your team finds value in what you are abstracting and you use the opportunity to teach and share knowledge about why.

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

  • 📕 Code Review Champion - My book on code reviews will help you become a world-class code reviewer. From giving kind feedback to navigating conflict, this book can help anyone wanting to sharpen their code review skills.
  • ❓​Questions for Devs - Building a team takes more than catching up about your weekend at standup. I've used these questions to build relationships with my team and push past the same old surface-level conversations.
  • ​📋 Pull Request Template - Maximize your efforts in pull requests by giving context right at the beginning of a new pull request. Copy and paste this template into your repo, and voilà!
  • 📊 ​Code Review Metrics - Start measuring how your team tracks against a few common code review metrics. This python script will pull your GitHub pull requests and generate a CSV you can slice-n-dice to get the data you want. It also has graphs! As this is an open-source project, your contributions and feedback would be great!
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Creating great software is not just about completing new features faster, submitting more pull requests, or fixing bugs. Every Wednesday I publish tips and tactics to help you meet tough deadlines, tackle tech debt, handle scope creep, manage stakeholders, make sure you're building what customers actually want, and more. I'll draw on what I've learned after spending 15 yrs as a software developer, Engineering Manager, CTO, and startup advisor.

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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Helping software engineers build better teams

Learn the tips and tools for building software as a team! Every other week, I send a long-form article, a team-building exercise, and resources to help you build better software teams so you can build better software.

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