The Observer Design Pattern
Games, desktop software, phone apps, and almost every software that a user interacts with has some sort of event handling system. In order to handle events, a common behavior design pattern known as the 'observer pattern' allows one or more objects to monitor if a change of state takes place in another object. In this talk, we are going to do a deep dive into the behavioral design pattern known as the observer. The pattern utilizes a Subject and Observer (or publisher and subscriber) model to notify when state has changed from the subject to one or more observers in order to help make our software more maintainable, extensible, and flexible.
I will show some examples of the observer in modern C++ as well as real world use cases of where observers are used for further study. Finally, I'll discuss the tradeoffs of the observer pattern, and discuss which scenarios you may not actually want to use the observer pattern. Attendees will leave this talk with the knowledge to go forward and implement the observer pattern, as well as how to spot the observer design pattern in projects they may already be working on!
Mike Shah
Mike Shah is an Associate Teaching Professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. His primary teaching interests are in computer systems, computer graphics, and software engineering. His research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis), software visualization, and computer graphics. Along with teaching and research work, he have juggled occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer in C++.
Mike discovered computer science at the age of 13 when googling ”how do I make games”. From that google search, Mike has worked as a freelance game developer, worked in industry for Intel, Sony Playstation, Oblong Industries, and researched at The Ohio Supercomputer Center to name a few. Mike cares about building tools to help programmers monitor and improve the performance of realtime applications– especially games. In Michael’s spare time he is a long distance runner, weight lifter, and amateur pizza maker.