Reflect on Design Patterns
One tool which has been very useful in my Computer Science career has been the use of design patterns. Design patterns would be like using a template to make results that are reusable. Some examples of our use of design patterns would include our use of Next.js and our use of React. One thing I find very handy about using design patterns is the fact that it breaks your program down into components. So you would have components such as header or footer which can be easily edited. This is especially useful like for Milestone 1 which one of the projects was “Make a footer”. You do not have to edit other parts of the code, only the part under footer -> components.
Using React has been very useful. Because I use ChatGPT to help design my code, this was a very manageable process because you just had to let the A.I. know you are using React and it can take it from there. That way many parts of your code are editable and reusable. I found next.js to be an extra-challenging task. In examples such as the bowfolios page, we actually took design patterns a step further and used a template that had already been created to produce our webpage. This was my favorite use of design patterns–when all you have to do is edit a template.
It is clear that using design patterns has been a valuable tool in constructing websites both with React and next.js. One component that was very useful for creating these websites was the NavBar component. Another tool that is useful with design patterns is API. This helps bring together the publisher and the user by offering a gateway service to handle APIs.
My use of design patterns has expanded beyond in-class assignments. My team is able to use design patterns when designing our Manoa Munchies page. This means we are using tools like Bootstrap to give a boilerplate version of the website before we make any changes. Overall, a computer scientist should get comfortable using design patterns because it is a necessity in streamlining the work needed in order to build a website like the one we are building for the final project.
The bottom line is, when you are using a framework such as React or next.js, you should expect to use design patterns. Getting more comfortable with these common structures is beneficial to writing specific code.