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Understanding Design Patterns

First of all, what is design patterns? According to the dictionary,

"A design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring
problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that 
can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for 
how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations." 

Software engineers are documenting solutions to commonly occurring problems so they don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to solving problems. These documented solutions can speed up the development process by providing tested examples. Design patterns are divided into a lot of categories and here are the most common design patterns categories:

Do I Use Design Patterns?

When I was asked “what design patterns have you used in your own code?”, I wasn’t exactly sure how to answer it. To be honest I don’t even know if I even used design patterns in my own code before. Then I looked up what design pattern is and I didn’t even realized that I have been using design patterns and I just didn’t know it. A recent time of when I used design patterns was for my final project that I am currently working on with my groupmates in my Software Engineering class. We are developing a website called “ManoaEats” where users can view the list of vendors that are in UH Manoa campus. We have used design patterns when we created the pages that we needed for this website.