Cultivate your personal design heuristics

Cultivating and refining personal design heuristics is one way we become better software designers. Whether you're aware of it or not, you use heuristics you acquired through reading, practice, and experience. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock explores how you can grow as a designer by becoming conscious of your heuristics.

The ouroboros is a mythical serpent shaped into a circle, clinging to and devouring its tail in an endless cycle of self-destruction, self-creation, and self-renewal. Becoming a good designer of software sometimes feels like that. Cultivating and refining personal design heuristics is one way we become better software designers. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we each use heuristics that we have acquired through reading, practice, and experience. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock explores how you can grow as a designer by becoming conscious of your heuristics. What are your go-to heuristics? How well have they worked? Do your successes or failures lead you look to discover new heuristics? While you may read others’ design advice—be it patterns or stack overflow replies, the heuristics you personally discover on your own design journey are likely to be the most important.