Nathan Dwyer's Page

I've been reading Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt, which talks a lot about experts. In particular, he discusses the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, and describes experts as having "…a vast body of experience that they can tap into and apply in just the right context. … These are the modern wizards."

Maybe on a good day.

A while back, a co-worker related a story about a design class he was teaching. He showed the class some…

This week, I'm deleting lots of my code.

This is actually a pretty common occurrence for me. In this case, a UI pattern that I came up with for a project works well in the small, but doesn't scale up. Other times, I've worked on a chunk of code and revisited it enough times that its structure was no longer clear, and the cognitive effort of remembering all its inconsistencies significantly outweighed the benefit of keeping it. Every once in a while I'll have thought of a better way to…

I often find myself responsible for designing system architectures. This isn't an accident. I like figuring out the big picture that causes all the pieces of a system to fall into place. The better the architecture is, the more the answers to follow-on decisions (e..g, system boundaries, class hierarchies, internals APIs) seem self-evident. With a solid architecture, first-order features have elegant solutions that automatically extend to second-order features and system…