Design patterns are a common, high-level language for developers. They enable a short-hand way of communicating application design among team members. Understanding how to recognize and implement design patterns shifts our focus to business requirement solving, rather than tinkering with how to glue our solution together on a code level.

Coding, like most hand-crafted disciplines, is one of those where you get what you pay for. While implementing a number of design patterns takes a certain amount of time, lack of doing so on a larger project will likely catch up with us in the future, one way or another. Similar to the "use a framework or not" debate, implementing the right design patterns affects extensibility, re-usability, adaptability, and maintainability of our code. Therefore, making it more future proof.

Moving forward, in the next chapter, we will look into the SOLID design principles and the role they play in software development processes.