Credits and Acknowledgements

This project is based on the ideas presented by Hernán Wilkinson (@hernanwilkinson) in his Diseño a la Gorra webinar.

Diseño a la Gorra explores the principles of object-oriented software design, with a focus on practical examples and heuristics for creating high-quality software. The videos are mostly in Spanish, but the code and ideas are universally understandable.

A central theme of Diseño a la Gorra is understanding software as a model of a real-world problem. From this perspective, developing software is fundamentally the act of designing an effective model.

According to this approach:

• A good software model abstracts the relevant aspects of the domain, allowing for clear understanding and effective solutions.
• Software design is a continuous process of learning and refining the model.
• A good model not only works but also teaches how to interact with it through its structure and behavior.
• Objects should represent domain entities, and be created complete and valid from the start, reflecting a coherent state of the real world.

The concepts behind self-assert were introduced in Episode 2 ("Valid Objects") and further developed in Episode 3 ("Modeling Sets of Objects").

Diseño a la Gorra also encourages a shift in mindset:

• Code is not written for the computer; it's written to model our understanding of the domain.
• Objects are not just data containers; they are collaborators that encapsulate behavior and ensure consistency.

This mindset is what self-assert aims to support: designing objects that are responsible of protecting their own validity from the very beginning.