Ruth Stalker-Firth

A structural engineer once told me that he would always win pictionary if he was teamed with another engineer. Structural engineers have a symbolic language of their own and use it, normally in the workplace, to communicate more accurately. To the onlooker it is all triangles, little circles and arrows. But to the trained eye they represent bridge spans with fixed supports under uniform loads. Similarly, electrical engineers use seemingly incomprehensible symbols to describe apparatus layout. (more…)

In the 1990s, Erich Gamma changed the way I thought about software engineering forever! Gamma visited the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where I was a PhD student, in order to give a seminar on design patterns.

The idea of extracting a solution template from a piece of software to turn it into a pattern which can be reused, was to me, an exciting step forward in software engineering. Instead of reusing software from a library that needs to be maintained and ported as necessary, abstracting the solution and creating a pattern repository gives software engineers a toolbox of meta-level solutions.

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