About

About Design is Refactoring

A collection of writings and presentations made by me, Ian Whitney (he/his). I'm a developer and IT manager working for the University of Minnesota. I mostly write Ruby, though recently I spend a lot of time working with Kafka and other data tooling.

Many of the posts on this site are about code design. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the design of my code. But, despite all that thinking, my initial coding attempts always have significant design problems. Yours probably do too. There are a lot of programmers out there better than me, but I don't think any of them are happy with their first drafts.

In writing there's the a maxim "Good Writing is Rewriting" and it's true in programming as well. If you want your code design to improve, then you have to refactor. And that refactoring shouldn't be haphazard code changes; you should be taking small, deliberate steps that you know will move your code towards a better design.

Hence the name. If writing is rewriting, then design is refactoring.

About Me

I am Ian Whitney, a Ruby programmer at the University of Minnesota. I am not a rockstar, or a ninja or even remotely epic. Other than a standing interest in improving my skills as a developer, absolutely nothing qualifies me for writing this site.