I would like to continue my reflection on my fundamental software development skills and how to reinforce them in this week’s blog post. The “Concrete Skills” pattern in the “Emptying The Cup” chapter of “Apprenticeship Patterns” by David H. Hoover and Adewale Oshineye describes the practice of building and maintaining your concrete skill set to make yourself a better choice for a professional role. Knowledge on how to write build files, familiarity with the standard libraries for your chosen programming language, basic web design, and JavaScript are some examples of concrete skills given by the authors. Possession of these concrete skills are what allow you to stand out as a candidate for a developer position. The authors recommend constructing “toy implementations” to demonstrate your understanding of these concrete skills in an interview.
I wanted to read and reflect on this pattern because recently I was challenged with a programming problem where I needed to iterate through the nodes of a linked list. I remember learning about the linked list as a data structure in a previous course, and now in the elective course that I’m taking, we’ve been tasked with implementing a linked list as well as performing operations on it. The implementation of each linked list node as an object with a ‘head’ containing data, and a ‘tail’ that functioned as a pointer to the next node in the list was familiar to me. Despite my previous experience learning about the linked list, I still spent a long time implementing a function that would do something and then iterate through the linked list. I knew I had to repeatedly set the head of the list to its tail within a while loop until the data ‘head’ of the list was empty. It was only with the help of my classmates that I rediscovered how to express that implementation in code and properly operate on each element in a linked list, and then exit the while loop once the ‘head’ member variable of the node was empty. I realized that while I believed that I understood basic data structures like linked lists, trees, and queues conceptually, I struggled with implementing those design concepts when put to the test.
The pattern’s recommendation to demonstrate your concrete skills through small-scale projects has me reflecting on my goals for a project I started a few weeks ago and have only spent a few collective hours on since. I’ve been wanting to practice my design patterns, so I started a Java project called “MonsterFactory” as an exercise. I have a collection of Java classes like Zombie, Werewolf, or Vampire that all inherit from a Monster superclass and share some member variables and methods. I want to implement a MonsterFactory class that follows the Factory software design pattern that could instantiate whichever Monster subclass we could want in any given situation. This project could serve as a functional example of my understanding of software design patterns, and I could also expand upon it to take advantage of the libraries offered in Java. I’m primarily working with strings and integers as data types in this project but learning how to work with images as a data type to accompany each Monster could be an entirely achievable goal for me to add to this project.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Michael's Programming Blog by mikesprogrammingblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.