Category Archives: Share What Your Learn

Share What You Learn -Apprenticeship Pattern

The “Share What You Learn” apprenticeship pattern, written by Adewale Oshineye and Dave Hoover in the book Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, 2009, is about sharing your knowledge. This is for software apprentices who have solely focused on their own growth/improvement. Sharing what you learn can benefit yourself as well as others. This is because it helps you learn to communicate what you know effectively, but also helps people who are on the same path as you, trying to learn the same things.

Maintaining a blog, tutorial channel, etc. during your early apprenticeship years can be great for your growth as a developer. You may feel like you only have a basic understanding of some topics that you have just learned, but this may benefit others more than you would think. As the book states, your basic understanding will translate to an easy to understand, straight to the point article, blog post, etc. that will help other apprentices who are right behind you in the journey to becoming a master. So don’t think that you need to leave it to someone who has an extreme in depth understanding of the topic, often times what they will give back to the community will not be as beginner friendly. You must be careful when sharing knowledge though and make sure that you are not spilling a companies secrets that can ruin your relationship with your team or get you in legal trouble.

I like this apprenticeship pattern in particular because it benefits yourself and others at the same time. Teaching is a great way to learn for both the teacher him/herself, and the student/learner. A certain part of this pattern really caught my attention and that is to not worry about leaving these posts/tutorials to people who have greater knowledge of the topic. Often times when learning something new, I will go to forums rather than tutorials. On these forums you can often find threads where students are asking the same questions about a topic that you are wondering yourself, and a lot of times other students will respond to these questions with their understanding of the topic. This is a great starting point for learning something new because often times there are basic, easy to understand, straight to the point responses that can kickstart your learning of the topic.

Hoover, D. H., & Oshineye, A. (2010). Apprenticeship patterns: Guidance for the aspiring software craftsman. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Austins CS Site by Austin Engel and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.