My Introduction to A Timeless Way of Building

At work I was recently asked to conduct a workshop for a general audience on using design patterns.

I planned the workshop to be largely focused on the USING aspect of that topic (more on that in future posts), but to frame it up I prepared a short presentation on the origins of design patterns.

I have to confess that until I was preparing for this presentation, I had never heard of Christopher Alexander, the architect who, in the 1970s, first came up with the concept of patterns and pattern languages, (even though I had been using design patterns in my work for a long while now).

Learning about his work on these topics was a revelation to me, and as I began to read more, I experienced a kind of epiphany, the result of a confluence of ideas and thoughts I’d been having recently around how to work better, how to have more fun doing it, and, ultimately, how to build better things.

For the presentation I didn’t have the time to read his books, but I read whatever I could turn up in Google searches online. Here are some of the better links I discovered that discuss his work:

• Gardenvisit.com - 'A City is not a tree': It is a landscape
• Summary of A Pattern Language
• Pattern Language.com
  
• Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog - A Timeless Way of Building Software

Now that the presentation has passed, I’ve had some time to source and read his books (a good chance they’re in your local library system, by the way). To get the full benefit, you really do have to read at least “The Timeless Way of Building” from cover to cover. It’s brilliant. You won’t look at anything built by humans quite the same way again.

“A Timeless Way of Building” is still, after all these years, applicable and relevant. Most importantly, I do believe that his ideas are not fully comprehended by the majority of the community of people who are building things on the web, (and I'm using the term 'community' broadly here).

In future posts I’m going to delve into the details of his concepts and how they have related to me personally in the work that I’ve been involved with. Including how a bunch of us, working on a project unknowingly rediscovered his pattern language process, without knowing anything about him.