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It’s all about the abstractions baby
I’ve been a developer my whole life, professionally about 10 years. In those 10 years, I feel I’ve always been able to “get the job done”, but things really started to click for me, once I embraced the abstraction.
What is abstraction?
From Wikipedia:
Abstraction, in general, is a fundamental concept to computer science and software development. The process of abstraction can also be referred to as modeling and is closely related to the concepts of theory and design. Models can also be considered types of abstractions per their generalization of aspects of reality.
Hmm, that didn’t really clear up much for me. Labels are hard for me, but I tend to think of abstraction as concept modeling by defining the “what needs to happen”, as opposed to the “how a thing needs to happen”.
Abstractions are concepts, not details. People use abstractions every day, without necessarily understanding the details about how the abstraction works. A simple example of this could be the abstract idea of your car’s gas pedal. You may not know how the internals of an engine work, but you do know that the idea behind that pedal is “make car go vroom vroom”. To a consumer of the abstraction, the details of how an abstraction accomplishes what it intends are unimportant, the important thing is…