I am writing this blog post about the “Expand Your Bandwidth” apprenticeship pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. To summarize the idea of this pattern, it is about learning about a greater variety of topics than just what tends to be the most relevant. The chapter describes the problem as having a narrow understanding of software development that focuses only on the low-level details of past work. The solution to this is to just start learning about different things. I think that this is a relevant concept that I seem to be dealing with at the moment. My specialty is computer science, and I have a deep understanding of many of the fundamental concepts in computer science. Software development, though, involves much more than just computer science, and I have not researched software development beyond researching computer science. The problem here is that I have a narrow understanding of software development, and the solution is to research the other topics that are important to understand besides computer science.

I think that this chapter relates closely to the “Concrete Skills” apprenticeship pattern. The main difference is that this assumes you already have a full set of skills that are already being applied in a day job, and “Concrete Skills” is about developing those skills in the first place. I have not yet begun a career in software development, though, so these problems are effectively the same. I have a narrow understanding of software development, and this narrow understanding is a set of concrete skills.

There are often times that I do research new and unfamiliar concepts, but these tend to be concepts that are still within the field of computer science and not software development. I do have a goal of learning and understanding more, and there are a lot of topics that I find interesting enough to read about, develop some experience with and practice applying. This book constantly emphasizes the importance of a willingness to read, practice, research and learn, but it puts an equal emphasis on software development. My concerns should be lessened by just applying myself more toward software development in particular.

From the blog CS@Worcester – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I am writing this blog post about the “Concrete Skills” apprenticeship pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. To summarize the idea of this pattern, it is about dealing with concerns about seeking a role on a team but not having any practical experience. I chose to write about this pattern in particular because I find it relevant to myself at the moment. I am searching through job descriptions and they all seem to prefer certain areas of experience that I do not have. This is also evident in our capstone project. The “solution” section of this chapter in the book says to gain some concrete skills. I do have concrete skills; my aptitude is for mathematics, data structures and algorithms – computer science in general. It refers specifically to “tools” and “technologies”, though, and I know nothing about that. It becomes apparent when I work on the capstone project that my expertise has no application here. This sort of computer programming has nothing to do with computer “science.” There is no logical problem to solve, there are only tools and frameworks to learn how to utilize in order to accomplish some basic tasks. My past experiences have not seemed to have prepared me to be any better than anyone else at approaching these problems. It seems, then, that the “concrete skills” that I need are of a different sort. The chapter recommends looking at the CVs of others and finding a common set of discrete skills that seem important to become familiar with. This seems like a good idea. In order to gain some level of confidence about being able to perform on a team, it would be helpful to become familiar with the skills and common knowledge among the demographic. Rather than continuing to study computer science, there seems to be an additional field of knowledge that I am unaware of a name for, which is comprised of tools and technologies that are required for certain software development tasks. It seems like it will be important for me to gain some “concrete skills” in whatever field it is this might be.

From the blog CS@Worcester – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This blog is about another pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. This pattern is about Craft Over Art. Choosing whether to add that extra feature that you think will impress your colleagues rather than focusing on what the customer specifies or want. This problem would occur to you more than you would think. We are not just programmers we are also artists. Creating beautiful, unique and creative applications are all within us, but if you are working for someone else, you might have to forgo of your creativity.

The book suggests focussing on delivering value to the customer rather than advancing your own self-interest. As a craftsman you are primarily building things in terms of the specification, working under someone and not indulging in your creative self. As craftsmen, we work for the customer. You need to do your best work in ways that place the interests of your customers over your desire to display your own skills or pad your resume. The book even says “If your desire to do beautiful work forces you out of professional software development and away from building useful things for real people, then you have left the craft.”  They said that the things we build for customers can be beautiful but it must be useful. That part of the process of maturation is developing the ability to sacrifice beauty in favor of utility when it becomes necessary.

I am split on this pattern. I kind of agree that we should do what the customer has asked us and enhance its quality, making it a software that can do almost everything that they needed. But, I also think that you can still practice art even if you are working for a company. You can inquire on your customer and see if they like what you are trying to do, but then again I see how this can conflict with the other software developers. Since you are not the only person that would be working on a project when you become an apprentice, there are things that others would think is not necessary to the software, so there definitely going to be things that gonna have to be agreed upon.

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

I am writing this blog post about the “Expose Your Ignorance” apprenticeship pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. To summarize the idea of this pattern, it is about making known what it is that you do not know in order to learn. People have a tendency of wanting to appear competent and knowledgeable about any job that is expected of them, but faking expertise is counterproductive. It is more helpful to seek knowledge than it is to hide ignorance. I have been looking at job descriptions lately, and many of them are filled with expectations and preferences referring to things I have never worked with before or have minimal experience with. My aptitude is for algorithms and data structures; I have studied and developed and implemented them a lot, for years. When it comes to “technologies”, though, I do not know anything about software development. There are so many languages and frameworks and libraries and acronyms that I am not familiar with because they have never been necessary or relevant before, and now I see that a lot of jobs are expecting proficiency with these tools. I am used to solving problems without extra tools, so in order to work in a new environment where an unfamiliar tool is necessary, it is important to establish that I do not know how to do anything using the tool. Then, I can begin to ask questions and learn how to apply my skills to the new problem. During the CAPSTONE project this semester, for instance, I am required to work with the Angular framework, and a tool for making things with Angular. I have no practical experience with any of these things, so whenever I need to know something in particular, I put out a question, so then I can learn. Rather than going off and trying to learn how to use these utilities, it is much more efficient to begin by seeing whether anybody else around already has an answer. Sharing knowledge and asking questions is a much more practical way to learn about how to work in a new environment.

From the blog cs-wsu – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I am writing this blog post about the “Read Constantly” apprenticeship pattern from the Apprenticeship Patterns book. To summarize the idea of this pattern, it is about spending more time reading about new material and ideas in order to stay in touch and learn about some new things. I think that this pattern is similar in many ways to the “Practice, Practice, Practice” apprenticeship pattern, because it is about taking the time and effort to become more familiar with a new topic. Reading research papers is an example given in the chapter. Any time I read about some unfamiliar topics, I always find that there is a huge depth of information that I have no idea about. Machine learning is one such topic that I spent a while reading about. After I had a good enough grasp of the basics behind the theory of it, I tried practicing implementing a basic multi layer feed forward neural network myself and have it classify some handwritten number symbols. Reading about it and implementing it was an interesting introduction into the field of machine learning, but continuing to read further into deep learning and the theory behind various learning algorithms, it becomes clear that there is still a ton about computer science that I have a ton to learn about. This is the case any time I look more than briefly into any broad topic. I was trying to implement a solution to a variant of the subset sum problem years ago and stumbled into NP-completeness and computational complexity theory. Constantly reading about new things is the only way to learn about different topics. The “problem” section in the book describes that there seems to be an endless amount of fundamental concepts that are unfamiliar despite proficiency in a programming language, and this is inevitable without reading constantly. Continuing to only practice in topics that are familiar makes it nearly impossible to expand into other fields without re-discovering them independently, which is unlikely when the areas are particularly advanced. Reading is like practicing learning. Proficiency in a language can only go so far.

From the blog CS@Worcester – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.