Methinks you mean 23 May, no?

ah, yes.
whoops.

some kind of weird sub-concious ‘i can’t believe it’s almost June’ thing I think.

(for those who missed it, I’d dated the most 23 March)

Oooo, under Methodological Anti-patterns…

# Golden hammer: Assuming that a favorite solution is universally applicable

I suppose this is the danger with getting too involved with pattern libraries… Mind you, a workable pattern from a library could still be a good start, so customisation is targetted to the specific problem rather than built ground-up…

well… i’d have thought that if you have a good enough pattern library you might have a few different patterns to choose from, so determining the best solution is still part of the process (and that may involve developing a new pattern).

If you customise your patterns for every project, are they still patterns?

Hmmm… certainly some patterns may work straight from the box, so to speak. Perhaps the power of patterns is in the high-level stuff, and its the finely-grained areas or content that may need customising. I think they can still be patterns, in terms of “high-level objects” — let’s say a login-module. But customisation might be appropraite at the detail level (if the login-module is for a wedding register, say, would it be more appropriate to customise the language? eg “sign in” rather than “log in” — this is a fairly small and pathetic example, I know…
I haven’t used a formal pattern library, per se. But there definitely are “modules” that I have created in Visio stencils, which I will use over and over again. (I do tweak, where necessary.)

M