435: Cohesive Code with Jared Norman

The Bike Shed

How easy is it for a layperson to understand your systems? Jared Norman is a software consultant, speaker, and host of the Dead Code Podcast who specializes in building e-commerce applications in Ruby on Rails. This episode follows two recent talks at RailsConf and covers a theme that emerged from both of them: coupling and cohesion. Tuning in, you’ll gain insights on how to create more cohesive components to allow for change and improve your understanding of value objects, systems, and more. You’ll also hear about navigating the complexity of domain-driven design and learn how to gauge if your code is easy to understand through a simple rule of thumb. We discuss what it might look like to improve the cohesion of individual objects, identify your systems’ seams to create simplicity, and the liminal space between inheritance and composition and the role of decorators in moving through it. Join us today to hear all this and more!

Key Points From This Episode:

Introducing Jared Norman recent speaker at RailsConf and Ruby on Rails specialist.
Jared’s interests outside of coding: cycling.
Themes that emerged from Jared and Stephanie’s talks: coupling and cohesion.
A rule of thumb for achieving high cohesion.
How value objects tie into the idea of cohesion.
Creating more cohesive components in order to have code and systems that are easier to change.
The relationships between objects in increasing cohesion and how complex nestings of objects can hinder this.
Rearranging systems in order to find seams and create cohesion.
Simplifying code in order to facilitate it working independently to support functionality.
Improving systems by identifying opportunities for decoupling and other relationships.
Inheritance, composition, and decorators and the liminal space between.
The complexity of domain-driven design.
A rule that indicates when a system is easy to understand.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

• Jared Norman
• Jared Norman on X
• The Most Useful Design Pattern
• Dead Code
• So Writing Tests Feel Painful. What Now?
• Dungeons & Dragons & Rails by Joël Quenneville
• Building Reusable Object-Oriented Systems: Composition
• Debugging at the Boundaries
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests
• What’s in a Name
• Joel Quenneville on LinkedIn

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