Adrian's Blog

A week after the publication of an article in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande on the importance of coaches for surgeons and other professionals in fields that don't normally use coaches, the New York Times ran an article that raised the question whether elite athletes really need coaches at all? 

Twenty years ago this month, I wrote a column for Object Magazine - System Design: Lessons from Architecture - that detailed my interest in and experience with the use of patterns as building blocks for architecture and software. At that point, I had built a house using Christopher Alexander's books as my guides. I had also taught many software engineering classes focused on a modular approach to development with reusable components that leveraged best practices as captured in patterns. In the mid-1990s more articles and books appeared in the software engineering domain supporting a pattern-based approach to development, which eventually became the de facto standard for advanced object-oriented development.