A cacophony of real life meant I only had about half an hour for actual code writing today. However, I did draw some lovely pictures.

Design is a tremendously important part of a project and, unfortunately, an easy one to skimp on. In bygone days, I leaped head-first into an implementation without sparing much thought as to how it would all fall into place - a practice I've surely left behind by this point, right, my dear imaginary reader? Back when I was using GameMaker or other high-level development methodologies, kleudge would still fly. However, writing the architecture from scratch as I am now, that's a recipe for disaster and heart-break.

I can't say I have much of a design process. It's mostly stomping around my apartment, grinding my teeth until the powdered enamel carries an idea into my brain, then scribbling furiously until something takes shape. I can't imagine that's how "the pros" do it, but now and again, it gets the job done.

I do end up with monstrous reams of doodles though. And again, I'm sure there's a better, more legitimate means of doing this - UML would be a good start - but for now, working alone, this serves its purpose. It gives me something to check against as I muddle through the code. Maybe more importantly, putting things to paper lets me visualize a living system.

These roughly hewn but concrete designs can be analyzed. They can be critiqued. They can be drawn on in turn as iteration carries the design forward. One of the things I like to do is scribble lines representing separations of concerns between the different classes and modules I've drawn out. It's a great way to neatly divide the system and the drive behind that consideration for engineering lends its own weight, an important one to be sure, to the project.

Design and its importance is something I might like to come back to, but it's late and another day is soon to break. To my credit though, I've managed to maintain a single topic throughout this entry. It might still be stream-of-consciousness fueled by visions of my pillow, but at least it stayed on track today. I'm working, my fictional friend, to introduce a little more discipline into this whole blog process.