I got the same 'click' recently, from reading about js design patterns (the oreilly book in particular), while working on a non-trivial html5 app. Ive been conscious of my tendency to write spaghetti code for a while, but didnt have any concrete guidelines on how to level up (just general advice like 'read good code' and 'fork github projects').

I had the sudden realization that using and recognizing design patterns was exactly what I was missing to get over the beginner-intermediate hump in the learning curve. I'd heard of design patterns before, but they'd come across as a rather lofty concept.

After a second and third look, I realized its immediately practical boilerplate stuff that one can copy/paste (and even more importantly, recognize in 3rd-party plugins and frameworks). Design patterns should follow after reading a 'cookbook'. Its just a name for techniques beyond your basic for/while loops (which could be thought of as the simplest of design patterns).

Pub/Sub can be viewed as a simple form of the observer pattern, and MVC is a more elaborate form (notice that in the article's TOC, MVC comes right after Observer). I've lost a lot of time banging my head on MVC too soon. For some reason, the introductory articles on MVC I was finding made scant mention of design patterns. Great to see more material discussing the concepts together lately.