Richmond's Premiere Ruby Users Group
"Design patterns" is a common phrase that is often spoken in the course of design and development of web applications. But it's genesis is not from programming, but Architecture. They come from a trio of books in the 1970s by Christopher Alexander, the most famous of which is the middle book: "A Pattern Language". The issue arises that Pattern Languages, much like spoken languages, are most effective when the speaker is fluent. We'll look at the origin of pattern languages and why they can be dangerous and even detrimental tools in the hands of the inexperienced designer and developer through examples of bad grammar and poor idiomatic choices (aka anti-patterns), and perhaps some architecture as well.
John Athayde (@boboroshi) is a designer and developer who spends a lot of time fighting bad coding practices in the Rails view layer. He is currently the Lead for UI/UX and Front-end Development–Internal Apps at LivingSocial.
Prior to LivingSocial he was the lead designer at InfoEther and ran Hyphenated People with Amy Hoy. He is currently looking for a large piece of land where he can garden and play in the dirt in between design and code sessions.
In his free time, he plays guitar and keyboards for DC's own Juniper Lane. He holds his Masters in Architecture from Catholic University of America.