Hello, again my fellow readers!

Last week we took a look at the beginner pattern, Your First Language. This week we will continue along the path to the next pattern, The White Belt.

As I have said, The White Belt is the next apprentice pattern after, Your First Language. This pattern is all about what to do after you have learned your first language and can strut your stuff with it. The problem The White Belt pattern is here to solve is when learning a second language becomes tiresome and tedious. Learning one language is great but, expanding your library is a must to become a software craftsman. What can happen, however, is slowdowns and stalling in learning. The solution to this is to adopt the mindset of a white belt. To quote the book, “Wearing the white belt is based on the realization that while the black belt knows the way, the white belt has no choice but to learn the way.” In other words, while you go about learning a new language, treat it as if it was brand new to you, even if you are learning something with familiar attributes. An excellent example is you have learned Java and now you are learning JavaScript. Both are fairly similar to each other and have overlapping ideas and methodology. Using the white belt philosophy, treat learning JavaScript as if it had no relation to Java. While this may seem counterintuitive (it still does to me),  the pattern claims that it will accelerate your learning. It will also allow you to discover new possibilities, as well as your mind, is open and without preconceived notions.

I understand where this pattern is coming from. I do get that an open mind can, and most likely will, lead to new possibilities. I agree with that. I suppose that my issue is that forgetting to accelerate learning is still something I find a bit backward. Looking at it, I must admit that I have not tried this method. Typically I find that making associations to things you do know is a good memory tactic and can speed up learning. It is entirely possible that the White Belt pattern will work for me. The only thing for it is to try it. I can legitimately say it doesn’t work without trying it for myself now can I?

Looks like I have some unlearning to do in my future.

Until next time readers!

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

Hi dear readers. Welcome to my next blog post. In this blog post I am going to talk about the next pattern called “Find Mentors”. I strongly believe this is a very important pattern and I will explain why below.

In the path of your career, you will always find yourself struggling learning about new stuff or not knowing what to learn . Don’t freak out though, this is normal. I know it sounds weird, but this is just the start of your journey and you are expected to not know everything. However, sometimes is very hard on to determine what to learn next or what is your next step in your career. So as the book suggests, a mentor is always a good help to have.

Finding the perfect mentor for you is not easy and you probably will never find him/her. It is true that there are a lot of people out there who  are professionals in what they do, but that doesn’t mean they are meant to be mentors. However, do not get discouraged because there are plenty of people who like to be mentors, you just got to be patient until you find him/her.

Another good point that the authors make in the book is that you might change mentors often or have multiple mentors as different people are specialized in different areas and have different knowledge. The hard part in all this process is finding and convincing this person to be your mentor. It might be awkward for you to ask and also weird for them. Unfortunately there might also be cases when they will refuse, but do not get discouraged. You will find other mentors. If you really really like a specific person to be your mentor, you got to win his/her ‘heart’.

While you grow you will be able to understand if you are in need of changing mentors and there is nothing wrong with that. Also as they teach you, you will understand what you really like and what you want your focus to be in. So start being part of communities and look for your mentors based on what you’re interested.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Danja's Blog by danja9 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The apprenticeship pattern framed the problem is that if you do not have room to make mistakes in your day to day programming, you will not have room to grow. The next line hit close to home, “It’s as if you’re always on stage.”

I learn quite a bit from my school assignments, but I don’t always think I have mastered each area before moving on to the next topic. The problem arises when I know my code could be improved upon, but it’s currently working. I don’t want to restructure my code too much, because I’m afraid of making it worse.

The term comes to mind, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” I have problems with this way of thinking, but when you’re pressed to make something work before the impending deadline, “good enough” is sometimes feels like the only option I have left.

This pattern champions a different approach to this kind of mentality. I like the idealized version that they have laid out based on the research of K. Anders Ericsson. This describes where a mentor would assign you a task based on your strengths and weaknesses. Once you have finished your mentor will review it and point out areas for potential growth the next time.

A important distinction the pattern makes is that we cannot use our profession to practice because when you practice, you make mistakes. You need to find time outside of your work session and make those mistakes when you practice.

I realize having a mentor may not always be realistic for everyone. However, I think I have a way to practice this over the summer. I have been talking to one of my classmates who has started a small consulting company. He offered me a position if I was interested, which I am.

They are currently is contracted by my alma mater, Quinsigamond Community College, to keep track of the information that is collected by their greenhouses. He has hinted that he might look to expand it if he is successful.

I feel this closely fits to what the pattern suggests. I will have a mentor. I will be practicing my skills and having close feedback. I will have room to make mistakes as my status as their employee does not solely rely on my performance. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to do a  good job, but it is not extremely high stakes. There is also the freedom to work when I choose, so I won’t be constrained by time, especially when I am going to be lifeguarding and taking a summer course. I am excited to begin this new chapter in my life — a new step on the journey towards mastery.

From the blog Sam Bryan by and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The apprenticeship pattern I’m addressing this week is Confront Your Ignorance from Chapter 2: Emptying the Cup. This pattern follows the previous pattern in the same chapter, Expose Your Ignorance, which I’ve previously written about here. The idea is that, once you’ve identified where your weaknesses are in your area of work, you must confront those weaknesses in order to grow. It’s hard to know where to start. Sometimes you’ve pinpointed weaknesses in areas where it is expected for you to have expertise, and it seems like you’re the only one who actually has those weaknesses. It’s hard to know where to begin. Confront Your Ignorance suggests that you choose one area and start filling in the gaps. Do so in whatever way is most helpful for you — whether it be through introductory guides or through diving right in.

This pattern is actually very helpful for me in this very moment. Over the past few days, I’ve been dwelling extensively on what I do and don’t know. What is expected of me as a software engineer, and what I expect of myself in this discipline. I’ve come to recognize that I have many weaknesses that I’d like to eliminate — things like algorithms, many topics in systems engineering, and so much more. There’s a lot of things I would like to experiment with, and there are also a lot of things I need to understand before I can do that. Frankly, it has been pretty overwhelming to constantly think of all of these things at once, and it’s been fairly discouraging as well.

I’ve exposed my ignorances (or rather, they’ve been exposed for me through the interview process), and now it’s time to work on them. It’s not going to change over night, and it isn’t going to change all at once. However, it will improve through consistent, deliberate work. That involves choosing one topic and chipping away at it over time. The difficult thing for me is likely going to be choosing which topic to work on, because I have so many things I’d like to learn. I suppose I can’t go wrong though, so long as I commit to learning and keep checking new topics off my list.

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

This week I decided to learn about how to “Find Mentors” by reading the pattern. This pattern gives advice about why and how apprentices should seek out to find mentors to continue down the path to becoming a journeyman. They give tips about attending conferences, joining online forums, and taking your potential mentors out to lunch if you have the opportunity.

I do agree that finding mentors is greatly important in the development process to become a successful software developer, but I think this pattern idolizes a certain type of developer and therefore limits the opportunities for mentorship for those who try to strictly follow what the pattern is advising. This pattern seems to focus on those who are directly working on the development of a particular language, framework, tool, or some variant of open-source software. They even pretty much open with the idea that it is very likely that your mentors are not local and that you will likely never meet them. I think that this is where the pattern is failing.

From my experience, there is almost always someone, or a group of people within a company that those with technical positions turn to for mentorship and advice. At my most recent internship, it was a man named Kurt who has worked on the proprietary software (Oracle) before signing onto the company that we both worked for over the summer (TJX). He initially was a contractor from Oracle, but TJX found that his expertise regarding the frameworks that made up our software made him too valuable to let go of and they hired him full time. He immediately became the go-to guy whenever anyone had a question about our software. He had been working on it for over 15 years and had gone through over 10 iterations of the software. A key thing to note is that while everyone asked him for help, they weren’t asking for mentorship. This is something that came with my internship as he was selected to be my “buddy”, which was just a fancy word for mentor. We spoke several times throughout the summer about both career goals, and different ways to solve problems. We spoke about how to solve certain problems that were specific, yet more general than our specific code base. To get this kind of mentorship, I didn’t need to lurk on an internet forum, and the same went for everyone I worked with that wanted to learn from him. All I had to do was ask. There will likely be a Curt everywhere, any of us end up working, and I plan on utilizing their mentorships.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Road to Software Engineering by Stephen Burke and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week’s installment of individual apprenticeship patterns I have decided to write about the chapter of our textbook called dig deeper. The reason I did this chapter is because it initially caught my attention with its relatability. The catch with this article was that you have a superficial understanding of different software tools. I find this to be extremely relatable because we see a lot of different tools in our classes and at the same time we don’t have much time to cover the tools and master them. I think in my testing class we were using a new tool every few weeks, which really hurt us in the end because I did not have a chance to fully grasp or understand how the tools(s) worked so I have a very superficial and not very deep understanding of these tools. I could probably use them if I tried hard enough and used google to assist me in my journey. I wish that one of two things happened. I wish we had more time to understand these tools or I wish that we did not cover so many tools, however I do understand that we need to cover many tools because there are many tools out there that are constantly changing and they are always making new tools too. The solution to the problem of not understanding the tools or having just a superficial knowledge of the tools is simple. You have to study and learn the new tools. It kind of sounds intuitive that you would have to spend time to learn the tools, but you really have to spend time to learn the tools. This means doing homework outside of work and being able to understand your learning in these tools. By this I mean not just simply taking an online tutorial on a software tool that you well and fully know will cut corners in attempt to try to make the tutorial more understandable and faster. This may seem good in concept but they are leaving out pertinent information that you need to know to master the tools.

From the blog CS@Worcester – The Average CS Student by Nathan Posterro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Sprint five lasted from April 8th to April 22nd. This sprint, we were focused on completing any big steps left that the project required in preparation for the upcoming sprint, where we will focus on our presentation. For the next sprint, we also have allocated enough time to polish minor details if necessary or finish any uncompleted project features.

My role this sprint was to implement a button that offered more buttons when pressed. This is useful in cases where we have multiple links or related content that can be categorized under a common theme.

To start, I created a new routing module and component for the new button. Yesenia helped me a lot with this task, since she set up the components for the existing buttons. She provided me with the correct commands, ng generate module file-name –routing and ng generate component file-name/sub-file-name. We worked together by bouncing ideas off as we pieced together the HTML and related programming for the new button. By the end of class, we successfully created a new button named dropdown that would rout to a new page, indicating the linked connection was successful.

This was not the full intention however, instead of bringing the user to a new page, the button should display three more options, each of which could have the capabilities to send the user to a new page. I created the three links, but I couldn’t figure out how to hide/show them upon triggering the dropdown button. I deduced that I would mostly have to play with the component.html file, I used the following link as a model of what I wanted to do.

https://material.angular.io/components/sidenav/overview

In that link, scrolling down to the section titled “Drawer with explicit backdrop setting” I was able to look at the existing HTML and trim it down to fit the needs of the project. Mat-form-field and mat-option was specifically what I needed and what I used. With few modifications, and again some bouncing ideas from yesenia, I currently have the feature up and running. Some small things that I would like to get done if possible would be changing the color of the dropdown text to match the other buttons, as right now it is very distinguished looking. Also the manner in which the new options appear is not what I originally thought of, instead of creating a pop out list, I was thinking the buttons would appear on the sidebar beneath the dropdown button and would shift all other buttons below it down. The link below shows what I was originally thinking, but I couldn’t make that work as easily.

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_dropdown_sidenav.asp

The reason why I decided to use the other link directly over this one is because I didn’t understand how the provided javascript worked enough to implement it in our project. I’m sure if I dedicated to it, I would be able to get the feature exactly how I want it, but this is not necessary and Ill only change the existing feature if we have extra time.

The focus for our next sprint will be coming up with our presentation and trying to merge our project with some of the other groups projects. We want to be able to combine our side bar with the team working on the search bar without stepping on toes. Tim is currently working on that, I may need to copy and paste some of my work in order to make sure its implemented in the current master branch.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS Mikes Way by CSmikesway and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.