Facade is a structural design pattern that provides a simplified interface to a complex system of classes, libraries or frameworks. It's like the front desk at a hotel - you just talk to the receptionist to book a room instead of individually coordinating with the cleaning staff, maintenance crew, and management team.

How to use it in a sentence

Did you see that new facade they put on the legacy codebase? It's like putting lipstick on a pig - might look prettier, but it's still a mess under the hood. Oh great, the sales team wants us to build a "simple" facade for the customer portal - I'm sure it won't take long, just like that "quick" refactor last quarter...

If you actually want to learn more...

• Martin Fowler has an oldie-but-goodie article on Presentation Domain Separation that dives into the benefits of keeping your UI logic decoupled from your core business logic. It's from 2003 but still holds up - unlike most of the code I wrote back then.

• For a more recent take, check out this piece on modularizing React apps using established UI patterns. Because apparently Facebook engineers struggle with messy frontends too - maybe that's why they keep changing the newsfeed layout.

• If you really want to nerd out, there's always the classic GUI Architectures overview. It's a bit academic, but a good history lesson on how we ended up with the UI patterns we use today. Perfect for boring your coworkers at the next happy hour.

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