Am I wishy-washy or have I been programmed from birth to be an in-the-middle kind of guy?

I am the 5^th of 9 children which puts me right in the middle, 4 older siblings and 4 younger siblings.

Politically I am left of the right and right of the left.

I am about 6 foot 2. I am rarely if ever described as tall, but I am certainly not called short. I weigh 210 pounds and no one calls me fat (well not in front of me anyway), however I’m certainly not skinny.

When it comes to software development in regards to object oriented design (OOD) I again fall in the middle. I have a hard time just being in the same room with someone who believes objects are overkill for business applications and that modeling a business with classes is a waste of time. Likewise, I cannot get on the same page with those who believe that OOD and every heuristic is a perfect fit for applications with a database backend and a business to represent, and if my objects don’t know how to display themselves on a web page then clearly I am not an object oriented developer, or at least one not worth his salt.

Well like always I am in the middle. Maybe it is because I am not dumb and yet I am not a genius, but software design and development of multifaceted business applications is too complex for me to not use some level of object oriented design to help me sort it all out. There are those that would argue that OO design is overkill and just complicates things. These are the people who squawk at me when I say that the reason I am adamant about OO design and analysis is because I need things simplified and ordered for my middle-sized brain to wrap around it. That said, many OO patterns and rules of thumb can cause more heartache than joy. As a developer who is on a never-ending quest to better myself I am always searching for a comfortable middle-ground where I can apply the OO heuristics that give me the benefits of this style of design and development, yet gain the wisdom to know when a practice could end up causing me misery. To make matters worse this subject matter spans many scenarios that I can find it hard to keep straight what I have decided I prefer and those that set me up for problems later. Since this blog entry is already long enough, I think I will start with my next blog entry to start addressing and recording the patterns and practices that I love, think I like, dislike, and detest.