Christian Shadis

In the apprenticeship pattern Stay in the Trenches, Hoover and Oshineye explore the importance of maintaining a development position in the face of success and the opportunity to progress into management. This is a very important topic, since many developers (and employees of other types too) have their careers reach stagnation once they make the leap into management due to their misconceptions about career progression.

This pattern is counterintuitive to me, as historically I have considered management positions to be the goal of any employee, and the thought of turning down a promotion would not seem to propel a career forward. Upon further reflection, the benefits of the pattern are more apparent. If a developer commits to remaining a developer throughout their career, they remove limitations on their potential growth as a developer and employee. They will continue to grow and evolve with the industry and become masters of their craft. Conversely, a developer who accepts a promotion into management may stagnate quickly. Management is a completely different occupation than development, and the recently promoted manager may find their skill set does not transfer. Similarly, the organization may not have much room for progression beyond middle management.

Remaining in a development position instead allows the programmer to spend their entire career mastering their development skills, increasing their capabilities and qualifications for more intense, higher-paid, senior-level programming positions. The programmer can advance and progress with development-based promotions, but staying out of management lends a significant advantage for attaining more prestigious programming jobs in the future.

I hope to use this pattern throughout my career. Once I had aspirations of progressing through management positions until I am high up at a large company, but progressing through management positions won’t be possible by virtue of programming skills – instead, a more attractive plan is to progress through the levels of development and engineering to finally land at a senior position. Not only will this maximize my potential as a coder, but remaining in a position interesting to me instead of stagnating in a more boring occupation will maximize my job satisfaction.

Reference:

Hoover, D. H., & Oshineye, A. (2010). Walking the Long Road. In Apprenticeship patterns: Guidance for the aspiring software craftsman. O’Reilly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Christian Shadis' Blog by ctshadis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Christian Shadis

In the apprenticeship pattern Breakable Toys, Hoover and Oshineye explore the effectiveness of learning through failure, and the dynamics of doing so in a workplace where failure may not be embraced. Essentially, they advise the developer to work on projects on their own time with the important distinction that they can safely develop without harming any other developers with breaking changes. They refer to these projects as ‘Toys’ because the developer should work on projects they find interesting or fun, which will make them more motivated to continue working on it.

This pattern, unlike some others in the book, is perfectly intuitive. “Practice makes perfect” is one of the more well-known clichés we echo, and this pattern is based on constant practice. In fact, much of the information I’ve learned about programming thus far has come from troubleshooting code I’ve written and figuring out why it doesn’t work. The only problem with constantly practicing a trade menially is a blurring of the lines between work and free time; however, developing projects of personal interest to the developer would make the practice far more engaging and feel less like work.

This pattern is not a particularly difficult one to implement, as developers are likely to build personal projects simply because they enjoy development. Yet if a developer uses their skills to build something they don’t care about, it only feels like work – instead, working on building ‘Toys’ feels more recreational and sustainable to implement in free time. To effectively use this strategy, the developer must emphasize the breakability of what they build and focus on using failures to improve both the project and their underlying development skills.

I hope to use this pattern throughout my career, but more specifically I plan to implement this pattern throughout my first development job. I will be exposed to many new technologies and frameworks in my new position. Using these technologies only at work would limit my comprehension of them. Instead, utilizing these new technologies in the failure-friendly environment of personal development projects will maximize my improvement as a developer.

Reference: Hoover, D. H., & Oshineye, A. (2010). Perpetual Learning. In Apprenticeship patterns: Guidance for the aspiring software craftsman. O’Reilly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Christian Shadis' Blog by ctshadis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Passion is the devotion we invest in of our interest, could be a hobby, sport, or even a profession. Upon reading the book “Apprenticeship Patterns”. There are multiple chapters that are divided up into 35 patterns to give a breakdown of the broad idea of being a craftsman. For example, I have read chapter 3 “Walking the Long Road”, towards the pattern of “Nurture your Passion”. This pattern entails about keeping a strong leveled mentality. Going into our career field as a software developer which the environment would cause an impact on one’s passion. This pattern gives us an idea on how to tackle this situation. 

After understanding the purpose of this pattern, I saw it made sense to find multiple ways to help keep positive during workflow. The section of drawing your map caught my attention because whenever we have a certain goal, dreams, and needs it is separated out from our work goals, dreams, and needs. Two different lives which you try to maintain but eventually it outweighs each other which conflicts you. Personally, speaking we would rather just be selfish and accomplish our own goals and dreams. We are only human. But at the same time, we do not want it to conflict our mindsets when it comes to our profession.

For the type of action, they would want to conduct to keep our passion in check was to write up a list to control a conversation.  It is true you must keep a cool mind and keep your mind positive. But there will be days where things will not work out. For example, what if you had a bad day, the only it will do is put you in a funk for whatever reason It may be. Work related. Personal related. There are many factors you don’t have control like an environment or said workflow. 

I believe that I can take these steps but not all of them. I do agree that you must absolutely make sure the passion is there and do however to protect it because it what makes us motivated to stay concentrated. People are different and should be able to nurture their passion differently. Composing a list can help but nobody would like to compose one before work daily, that can be taxing. Sometimes you must be selfish, such as leaving work while the team are staying late. Just playing it by ear on a daily as it can shift constantly. A road we are set and take the necessary actions. 

From the blog cs@worcester – Dahwal Dev by Dahwal Charles and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week’s pattern, I decided to read ‘The Long Road’ from Chapter 3: Walking the Long Road. The context of this pattern is that today’s society values quick success and overnight celebrities more than long term goals and success. Due to this, software developers are much different compared to veteran software developers and make the same mistakes they had made when they were inexperienced software developers. The problem of this pattern is that I, the reader, aspire to be a master software craftsman but my aspiration conflicts with what people expect from me, quick success. My guts tell me to take the highest paying job and first promotion I’m given and ignore slowly building up my skills. I thought this was pretty spot on of how society is today. Social media makes it so anyone can become an overnight celebrity which is probably one of the root causes as to why society is this way. Too much do we value quick cash and success, some people even expect it which is weird considering how hard it is to become an overnight celebrity. People need to take a step back and learn to have a long term goal and work towards your success instead of trying to get rich quick.

As for the solution of this pattern, it was basically the same as I wrote above. I should accept that I may be considered weird for thinking long term but I should accept it. I should also keep focusing on my long term goal, which is to become a software craftsman. By following the long term goal of a software craftsman, I’m able to become more skilled at learning, problem solving, and developing strong relationships with my customers. This is a good thing because, as mentioned before, people are too focused on getting rich quick and not focusing on building themselves up. By sticking to this, I won’t get rich quick like some of these people but I will be much more experienced, having built myself up long term and sticking to a goal. This is a long journey I’m not ready for but this will help me much more later in my life.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Brendan Lai by Brendan Lai and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Confront Your Ignorance

This pattern specifically covers an area of your skill-set or knowledge that you are not well-versed in. It challenges you to take the thing you are ignorant of that is relevant to your work or perhaps relevant to future work and invest your time to master it. The roundabout way of doing so is, as it describes, to pick the skill-set or technique and fill those gaps.

Seems simple enough but I felt as if this pattern is missing a bit of useful advice. Your personal growth when confronting your ignorance is more than organizational as the actions describes. It’s a matter of personal reflection and recognition. It’s definitely easier to say, “hey I know nothing about network communication”, and harder to recognize your own competency in network communication. The pattern does cover a bit of this, but it seems to focus far more in directly confronting easier problems.

I picked this specific pattern as it directly impacted how I worked during this semester’s sprints. In specific I applied this pattern unknowingly when I was thinking about working on a specific issue that related to using html. I have seen html code and references to it plenty of times during my college career but have never really used it before. I also overhead fellow classmates speak about it on rare occasions and mention building a custom resume styled website using html and other tools. I have had plenty of introductions and chances to learn something that is common in computer science, yet I have never taken the chance to learn it. At the start of the first sprint, I finally confronted my own ignorance around html and put myself into a situation where I would have to learn it in order to complete the issue. While I could have done this at any time it seemed prudent to place myself in a position to succeed at and implement to help motivate me to fill my gap in knowledge. This is why I felt like this pattern should describe learning how to identify your weaknesses a bit more as just knowing your weakness is quite different as confronting it is. One is merely a slight acknowledgement and the other lets you learn how to continually find your gaps.

From the blog CS@Worcester – A Boolean Not An Or by Julion DeVincentis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.