Design Patterns You're Using Wrong
Design patterns are supposed to solve problems. But most developers learned them from textbooks, not production. This series explores why the patterns you learned don't work the way you think they do.
Design patterns are blueprints. The Gang of Four wrote them. University programs teach them. Every interview asks about them.
But there's a gap between the textbook version and the production version.
A Singleton is supposed to be simple: one instance, globally accessible. But in production, it is a source of hidden state, thread-safety nightmares, and testing disasters.
A Factory is supposed to decouple object creation. But in production, it adds indirection that makes code harder to follow without solving the real problem.
An Observer pattern is supposed to decouple components. But in production, it creates invisible dependencies that break silently when things change.
This series is about what happens when design patterns meet real code. Not the textbook version. Not the interview version. The version that breaks at 3 AM in production and you have no idea why.
Each pattern we explore has a moment where it looks elegant in theory and becomes a liability in practice. Understanding that moment is the difference between a developer who applies patterns religiously and a developer who knows when patterns are the answer and when they are the problem.