Perception is Reality... Sort Of

The old saying has sticking power. It resonates. It feels true. It's hard to argue with.

I make a habit -read obsession- of finding the common themes and intersections of different readings. I was in a leadership class for two days at work this week. The discussion was excellent. Someone used the phrase "perception is reality." I immediately began reconciling this with my main conclusion of the ebook Getting Real - that running code is real, everything else is not. I had a problem. If only running code was real, what about perception? Is the old saying wrong?

A better question: does the word "real" in my conclusion mean the same thing as "reality" in the old saying? Sort of.

Perception is reality.
Perception is not shared reality.
Shared reality is what counts.

Getting Real attempts to reduce the variance of unshared realities by preferring running code over metadata about running code.

Design Patterns and Refactoring

Yes, it's that topic - Design Patterns - we all want to master it, but somehow we never really finish reading the first couple of chapters of the book. Why? Well in my defense, it's boring!

But before I throw myself under the bus, I just want to say that I've been wanting (as a personal goal) for months -even years- to dominate the topic of Software Design Patterns. I've even bought an extra book from the people of "Heads First" but for some reason I can't stick with it long enough to learn them.

Yesterday at work one of our engineers shared a great resource that seems to present the topic of Patterns in a more human way. I haven't read and revised the whole site, but what I've seen has been really good!

SourceMaking

They cover Patterns, Anti-Patterns and Refactoring. Check them out and let me know what you think, as I too will be reading it.