Thank you :-)

Would you say that it made you a better programmer?

Probably. It was a good read. I was really excited about it at the time. The danger is that you can take the book to heart too much and start over-engineering everything -- I shit you not, I've seen code that has things like a PainterStrategyFactorySingleton. As you gain experience designing systems, you'll eventually stop thinking about this or that GOF pattern and just build a system... like looking into the Matrix and just 'seeing' it.