In tech, most developers tend to think about a career progression as junior to senior, to lead, to architect and so on. To some extent, I think something is usually missing from that progression, technical proficiency. One can describe it as going from a consumer to a creator. Think of it like using something like React or Angular in the beginning, and then moving up that technology proficiency chain. From where you are just consuming that framework to where you end up creating a framework that is used by other developers, and they become your consumers.
To get to that point, you have to build up your skill-set, and you start with basic proficiency in your language of choice. From here, you work up to data structures and algorithms, and finally into design patterns. Design patterns are general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. They are reusable, extensible, and are of industry standards. In this article, I am going to go through five different design patterns that I believe every developer should learn.
Singleton Pattern
This pattern involves a single class which is responsible for the creation of an object while making sure that it is the only one created. This class provides a way to access it, which can be accessed directly without the need for instantiation of the class object. The most common reason for this is to control access to some shared resource.
As an example, the pattern may come in handy when doing things like a database driver. If you are over on the client, it comes in handy when you want to know the current state of the app that is in a Singleton. The advantage is that you can go and get to that data anytime that you want. The disadvantage is that once you have added that constraint, instead of everybody being able to go and access it directly, you have got narrow down to whomever the consumers are.
This pattern is one of the most misused. Singletons are for use when a class must have exactly one instance, no more, no less. Some developers frequently use Singletons in an attempt to replace global variables. For intents and purposes, a Singleton is a global variable, in that it does not do away with the global variable, it simply renames it. The use of a Singleton is uncalled for if it is simpler to pass an object resource as a reference to the objects that need it rather than letting objects access it globally. You, therefore, have to know and make sure that you are using it the right way and at the right time.
#programming #design-patterns #software-development #technology #data-science
