This pattern form “Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman” by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye is probably the scariest thing I read in this book so far. It describes how in order to be a good “craftsman” in software development one should be able to dig deeper into the knowledge about the problems they are working on. It shows you how one must try and be able to find more information about things in order not to be just a person who puts some code together and is what the book calls “programming by coincidence”.

This is a very interesting and intriguing pattern in my opinion but at the same time makes me feel as one of the people who just happened to code but do not know what they are talking about. It might just be my own feeling at the moment but nevertheless it is there. In my professional work I have always worked on very custom project and not very often things were reused which lead, at least in my case, to constantly only gaining surface knowledge of certain subjects. It is not easy to admit that I am probably not as knowledgeable as some of my colleagues, but I think this pattern is showing me how I might be able to fix this problem.

I am very much in agreement with what this pattern is describing, and in my own opinion a living example, even though I am constantly reading some new materials about my chosen field I still feel it is not enough and I should dig deeper to be able to stand out . Knowledge about a subject is always precious but just like the pattern describes if it is not deep enough it will not be really useful, and it might become a problem later on. One thing I definitely understand from this pattern and I like to think that I’m doing right is reading of the documentation and specifications, even though it might not be enough I think that this at least is somewhat redeeming for me.

This pattern is also somewhat problematic for reasons that sometimes getting more knowledge about subject is just plain boring and monotone, I know it sounds as an excuse, but I never heard about anybody excited to read some standards and specifications. Yes, it has to be done and it should be, but it is definitely not enjoyable.

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this weeks assignment, I decided to write about the “Practice, Practice, Practice” pattern in the book. This one looked interesting to me because I thought to myself, “Obviously, you have to practice, what could they possibly have written for this” To my surprise they actually had a method that I wasn’t expecting.

The article starts off with a context and a problem like all of the sections do and basically the problem is that a programmer doesn’t have room to make mistakes in their daily job, and they can’t learn because of that. This problem makes sense because messing up in your daily job is too stressful. You aren’t given any room to actually learn from those mistakes.

The solution part, like all the patterns, is the longest part because this is where everything is explained. This section leads off by describing the ideal world as being like a school almost. Programmers can be given random assignments and receive feedback on said assignments, and they can get more assignments as they progress. However, we don’t live in that ideal world, so programmers “must fall back on their own resources to achieve the same effect.” (Oshineye, Hoover).

The next part is what really intrigued me. They relate coding to martial arts by saying the katas are a great way to practice. Katas are basically opponent less exercises to take away the stress from the fighter so they can just learn. In programming terms, this basically means just performing exercises on your own to help you learn without the pressure of being fired. I love that someone made an actual coding dojo in Paris because it is such a good idea. It gives people the chance to code stress free, and there are other people there to review the code that is being produced, and help those who are struggling.

The action section tells the reader to find a problem in one of their books that they should struggle with and they should keep doing it and keep note of how their solutions change each time they perform the exercise. This is a great way to learn because it gives the programmer a chance to learn how to better their code and come up with better, more efficient solutions.

Overall, I really enjoyed this section. Like I mentioned before, I didn’t know how they made practice a whole pattern, but it was very interesting. The whole martial arts metaphor worked really well because coding and martial arts apparently have a lot of similarities. I plan on using this method in my future.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Life in Comp Sci by Tyler Rego and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

When I started programming, I was hoping to be a professional programmer within a year. Maybe two. I pictured myself as an expert, and studied the minutia of Python. If I memorized the documentation, I’d be an expert, wouldn’t I?

This apprenticeship pattern describes why that line of thinking is false. Becoming an expert is a lifelong experience, and the expert realizes there is always more to learn. It warns against taking the best, highest-paying job as soon as possible. Instead, value learning and accept the role of an apprentice.

I beat myself up for not pursuing my interest in programming when I was a child. I asked a cousin how he programmed video games when I was 10 years old, but didn’t write my first line of code for 5 years. Even then, I found the task daunting. Obsessing over details slowed me down. I didn’t completely dive into bigger projects until my 20’s.

The best learning experience I’ve had was an internship. I had freedom to try new things, make mistakes, and overcome challenges. I built a large project on my own, which my team loved. At a larger company, I would have likely worked on a much smaller piece of a huge puzzle. The experience of starting on my own will pay dividends for my entire career.

Similarly, while returning to college after a few years of programming was frustrating, it was helpful. I had thought CS-101 would be a complete waste of time. Instead, it was a chance to dive deeper into subjects I was already familiar with and gain exposure to concepts I hadn’t. It provided a foundation, which is the essence of this pattern.

This section of the book says there is no one so far ahead that you cannot catch up if you think decades ahead. This idea is an extreme relief to those of us who started a bit late. It’s tempting to compare ourselves to the teenage CEOs of the world and take shortcuts to catch up tomorrow. But I plan to write software for the rest of my career, so this pattern is a reminder to take my time, enjoy the process, and understand that consistent, continual effort will get my skills where I’d like them to be.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Inquiries and Queries by James Young and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

“You should not also underestimate the power of writing itself…You can lose your larger sense of purpose. But writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.”

—Atul Gawande, Better

Record what you learn has the purpose to make everyone able to memorize things for a very long time. Using this pattern, it’s not just about writing down notes in a paper and then forget about it. It is about writing down the information you need to learn and read it continuously to keep that information stored in your brain. Keeping a record of your lessons to a blog or personal wiki, it is not a bad idea at all. You decide whom you’re going to share it with, or not share it at all. As long as you write down your notes and get back to them to read or even to make improvements, your brain will be in the perfect shape of memorizing things.

This pattern made me realize that taking notes and writing the most important parts of the lesson is not the end of the learning process. Most of the time when I have to learn something new, I write pages and pages that never end, read them, and then I write a summary without looking at the notes. The problem with this is that after I am done with that lesson, I don’t really go back and read those notes, nor the summary. I wonder if I still have those notes?!

I found this pattern very useful and interesting in my career. Starting from today, I will keep track of my writings, add more details to them, and stick the date they get written, so that when I go back, I would find very organized writing that would make me go back to it over and over again. There is no better thing as reading constantly and memorizing useful information. Another important part of this pattern is that when you go back to read you realize how much things have evolved for a specific topic, and you ask yourself if you should update the original or not? In my opinion, the same as everything nowadays gets updated, writings need an update as well. As a conclusion, keep a record of your writings, the same way you keep a record of bank transactions…

From the blog CS@Worcester – Gloris's Blog by Gloris Pina and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Recently in CS-343, I have been introduced to the concept of
design patterns. These are essentially code-writing techniques that help make
code easier to describe, modify and maintain. There are a wide variety of design
patterns, each with different benefits and drawbacks. My last class on Thursday
ended as we began to cover the Singleton Pattern, and so I decided I would look
into Singleton in advance of our activities next class about it. My research
led me to Andrew Powell-Morse’s blog post “Creational Design Patterns:
Singleton,” which can be found here:

https://airbrake.io/blog/design-patterns/creational-design-patterns-singleton

This post, as you may expect, is focused on explaining the
Singleton pattern to the reader. Powell-Morse accomplishes this by using real-world
analogies to describe the concept of Singleton and a programming example to show
how the pattern can be implemented in code. I chose to write about this blog
not only because it explains Singleton well, but also because I found the
programming example interesting. The purpose of the Singleton pattern is to
ensure only a single instance of certain classes can exist at a time, which Powell-Morse
clearly states right at the start of the blog. This is a simple enough concept
to grasp, but Powell-Morse elaborates further by explaining that Singleton
should be thought of in terms of uniqueness rather than singularity. He uses real-world
examples of uniqueness, those being individuality in people and a unique deck
of cards used for poker games, to describe situations in which Singleton can be
useful. These examples, especially the deck of cards, have helped me understand
that Singleton is useful in programs that only require a single instance of a
class, and I could definitely see myself applying this concept in future
projects to help reduce memory usage from unnecessary objects.

Since I found the deck of cards analogy especially helpful, I was pleased to discover that it was the focus of Powell-Morse’s programming example. However, the example’s complexity made it somewhat difficult to understand at first. Instead of simply demonstrating how Singleton is coded, Powell-Morse applies the concept to a program using multiple threads that separately remove card from the same deck instance. I have not written many programs myself that use multi-threading, and this lack of experience made the example confusing initially. The example is also written in C#, which is a language I am not nearly as experienced in as I am with Java. Despite my initial confusion, I eventually understood the example and grew to appreciate its complexity. The use of multi-threading in the example helped demonstrate a major drawback of Singleton and how to work around it in C#. The example not only taught me how to implement Singleton into my future coding projects using static variables, but it also showed me how to work around Singleton’s issues with multi-threading. This blog post also taught me more about a language that isn’t Java, which is always welcome.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science with Kyle Q by kylequad and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.