This week’s Craftsmanship Pattern is another important one, breakable toys. This stands for the idea that experience is built upon failure just as much, if not more, than success. This idea is very good, as no one wants to fail, but failing is one of the best ways to learn, as if you are always successful, it is much more difficult to learn what does not work and what to avoid. The idea of never failing means you will never take any risks. To quote one of my favorite memes, “You didn’t grow. You didn’t improve. You took a shortcut and gained nothing. You experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.” While the above is pointed at cheating in a very difficult video game instead of “Gitting Gud” (intentional spelling) to pass a difficult task, I feel like the same idea applies here as well. It is important to learn what to do to succeed from what does not work, and what does work to continue using it.
To help with this growing, and similar to last weeks, it can be good to set up a private space where you can seek out this failure to learn from the experiences. For projects that you can fail on, try to build you own minor application, maybe a calendar or address book, for example. Things that are not too big, but still good enough to allow for failure without negatively impacting you. One highly recommended thing to do in the book is to create your own personal wiki, as you can use it to record what you learn. They are also nice since they can be simple, but still allows you to learn about things like HTTPS, REST, parsing, web design, etc. Sticking with this long enough will teach you about many things you many not have been exposed to otherwise, again creating an overall positive experience, because you will have some failure along the way, but how you overcame the failure is important. The book shows an email that Linus Torvalds saying that he is making a free OS based loosely off of minix, and those who know know where he went with this, and that is where we got Linux.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Erockwood Blog by erockwood and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.