For this week, I read a pattern called Nurture Your Passion. This pattern will occur when you work in an environment where you are exposed to hostile conditions, such as “demoralizing corporate hierarchies, project death marches, abusive managers, or cynical colleagues.” These conditions will sap all your time and your energy. If you do not have a proper way to against that negative energy and protect your passion, you will burn out after only a short time walking on your long road. Furthermore, you may not want to continue to walk on that long road anymore because you are exhausted and completely uninterested in your passion. To prevent that from happening, this pattern will provide you with some solutions to nurture and maintain your passion when you actually encounter those hostile conditions.

First of all, you need to work with yourself. You should find ways to grow your passion and enhance your knowledge over time, such as building some breakable toys to dig deeper, reading timeless books to open your eyes to a different world, joining a group to learn and share your knowledge, or drawing your own map to look for organizations that can offer you suitable career paths. Second, external factor is another important element that you need to care about to protect your passion. You should have a clear boundaries about the types of environment that you want to work in. You should be willing to say “No” or to refuse anything that might destroy your passion. One of your responsibilities as a software craftsmanship is to keep your passion strong, track on your improvement every day, and try to find a suitable environment to develop yourself.

In my opinion, the Nurture Your Passion pattern is one of the most essential pieces that apprentices should know to help them prepare mentally to avoid burn out in the face of hostile conditions. For myself, this pattern is very useful for my future career. I believe that in the process of going on a long road, there are many problems that will drag my passion down and at some point it will stop my progress. So, knowing this pattern in advance is one of the advantages that helps me avoid or eliminate most of the negative energy to protect my passion. As long as my passion remains, I can overcome anything that stands in the way of my progress and continue on my long road.

From the blog CS@Worcester – T's CSblog by tyahhhh and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week, I took a look at the ‘Expose Your Ignorance’ apprenticeship pattern. The pattern describes the dilemma in which your employer is relying on you to do a job, but you are unfamiliar with some of the required tools. This situation can be the result of many things, one of them is you are the only person that was available to do the job. The pattern proposes that you “expose your ignorance” when you need help rather than staying silent and learning on your own. It is potentially beneficial for everyone when you can present the problems you are having. Over time, it becomes detrimental to protect your pride and hide the fact that you don’t understand what you are working with. Not only does it prevent you from learning and doing work, but it also increases the pressure and workload for the team. So the best way to avoid all of this is to get comfortable with asking for help and showing off your learning ability.

As soon as I read through the pattern I could immediately relate to the problem described. In the time I have spent working, there were always a few occasions where I would be completely lost. And though it was embarrassing at first, it was always beneficial to ask for help as soon as possible rather than waste time getting nothing done. I could also see this potentially occurring in a sprint, where team members are all occupied with their respective issues, and you are left with a task involving concepts you aren’t familiar with. There is always the pressure to show competence when working in a team, but as stated in the pattern, asking questions will expose your learning ability to your team and can even help them gain new clarity about their knowledge on the subject.

The therapist’s story mentioned in ‘The White Belt’ pattern was mentioned again, which involved taking a not-knowing stance to better understand clients. But in this case of this pattern, it is not feigning ignorance, but exposing it to learn. I think the comparison between an expert and a craftsman was interesting: “experts will do everything they can to remain wedded to a single context, narrowing the scope of their learning, their practice, and their projects. Craftsmen, on the other hand, need to have the courage and humility to set aside their expertise and wear The White Belt as they pick up an unfamiliar technology or learn a new domain.” But as mentioned before, it is not the goal of an apprentice to become an expert, but a craftsman. I will continue to keep in mind that it is important to expose my ignorance.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Null Pointer by vrotimmy and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The pattern I decided to read is titled “Stay in the Trenches” from chapter 3 of Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. This pattern spoke about how people often equate being promoted into a managerial role with success but how this can actually take you away from the craft of programming. The pattern goes on to talk about how we should work with our employers to see if they can reward us in other ways that keep us close to the act of programming. Next, the pattern discusses how it is easy to apply this pattern selfishly but that experienced developers will find ways to make choices that will help their co-workers as well. Lastly, this pattern ends with suggesting its reader to come prepared with alternative rewards in case they don’t like the rewards offered by their potential employers, especially if they take them away from programming.

The most thought-provoking piece of information I got from this pattern was the bit about how I should make choices that are in my best interest, but how those choices don’t have to be blind to the needs of those around me. It was interesting to hear this because in a pattern that I’m learning about negotiating and advocating for myself, I’m also being taught how I can still be compassionate to others on my team. This is refreshing to hear because it seems like developing can often be a cut throat and intense environment to work in.

As far as how this pattern has caused me to change the way I think, I would say it re-enforced some of the beliefs I had. In a way, I’ve learned first hand what this pattern has described. I started working in human services as a residential counselor and worked my way up to managing a group home on my own. I learned the hard way that by entering a managerial role, I did a lot less case management and had less time with the individuals I served than when I was a residential counselor. Because of this and some other factors, I decided to step down back to the role of a residential counselor which I personally find more rewarding. This realization I made is the kind of message I got from reading this pattern. If I am passionate about programming, I need to be mindful of the opportunities I may receive in the future and make sure they are aligned with my desire to be a software craftsman.

Lastly, I’d like to mention that there isn’t anything in this pattern that I disagree with. It was reassuring to hear something I have learned in life being echoed in this book, even though it was in a different career path.

From the blog Sensinci's Blog by Sensinci's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The white belt apprentice pattern refers to the part of the movie where the main character thinks they know it all, but instead suffer tragically in some way due to their ignorance. This pattern recognizes that now that you have some skills, the real journey begins.

Assumptions can sometimes be dangerous and can impede your learning. Many times, when I’m trying to learn something, I associate with how it can be like doing something else. While this can be helpful to get me to remember how to do something, this method can also leave out the realization of other possibilities that a certain strategy offers. For example, throughout experimentation with different ingredients and brewing strategies, today many different brews of beer exist. This wouldn’t be possible if these craftsmen didn’t take the time to forget what they knew about making beer already, otherwise they would have just crafted the same one beer repeatedly.

While I find the information in the pattern interesting, I really wonder if I can apply it in my own endeavors in programming. I become doubtful I guess because this is a new way of thinking about how to learn for me. However, I feel like the explanation of learning your second language is put perfectly in the book. The need to feel productive is a dominant urge that I have, but that need must be sacrificed sometimes to learn something new and improve upon my skills. In fact, the book says that this is the most productive way of doing this so in turn, I guess nothing is really being lost.

Becoming comfortable with not being great at something after being great at it for the sake of learning is something I need to get better at. Learning how to do things with my left hand will be helpful if I cannot do things with my right hand, although it would feel naturally uncomfortable to do so. While I am open to and applaud the idea of this pattern, I can see myself struggling to apply it in my own life.

From the blog CS@Worcester – You have reached the upper bound by cloudtech360 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Learn How You Fail

This Apprenticeship Pattern covers learning how to fail, and more importantly how to recover from failing. It makes the point that failure is necessary to learn a new skill, and if you’re never failing then you’re likely not trying new things and not expanding your knowledge. Failure is a normal and natural part of learning something new, and it’s just as much a part of the process as anything else. If you want to learn a new skill, you can’t be afraid of failure, and you have to accept that it will happen at some point. By trying to avoid failure, you’re actively hindering your learning and limiting your potential skill.

The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes the point that learning how you fail helps with self-assessment. Through failure, you can learn more about yourself, such as what things you have more difficulty with, and what things you can pick up relatively easily. If you don’t try to push yourself to failure then you’ll never discover your limits, and you won’t know how efficiently and effectively you could be working. Failure also forces you to admit your weaknesses, and to learn not to waste time with things that are outside of your skillset, and instead spend your time doing things that you know you can do correctly.

The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes a point about not getting down on yourself about your failures. By changing your mindset from failure being a bad thing to failure being a valuable experience for learning, you will become more productive overall and more capable of learning new skills. If every time you experience failure you get down on yourself and become afraid of failure to avoid the experience, then you’ll become much less productive, much less capable of learning new skills, and much less experienced overall. The correct way to minimize failures and maximize potential is not to avoid it altogether, but instead to take it on your stride and learn from it so that the situation in which the failure would occur wouldn’t ever happen again, rather than avoiding the failure itself. Only in this way would you be able to become a proficient software craftsman, because that requires learning many new skills, and has the potential for many pitfalls and failings that you must learn from.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Blog by anelson42 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Upon reading the first line of “Breakable Toys”, I knew I was in for a pattern that I could connect to. Often, my behavior can be related to a “bull in a china shop”; while not outwardly malicious, my clumsy nature with unfamiliar material can often lead to mishaps and damages.

This is where the breakable toys come into play. According to “Apprenticeship Patterns”, journey-programmers can benefit from making similar programs to the ones that they work with in their profession. These “dummy programs” can then be played with to one’s content, allowing for all sorts of experimentation without worries of destroying the actual project.

To me, I found it useful that the pattern recommends “creating a familiar game like tic-tac-toe in many different languages”. It reminds me of my earlier projects where, as stated in a previous blog, I would practice new languages with familiar tactics. I find it to be a valuable way of connecting “Breakable Toys” to other patterns (such as “Your First Language”).

Most importantly, I believe that “Breakable Toys” is one of the most instrumental patterns to my professional future. Science is not a field involving constant “correct-ness”; science instead does quite the opposite, and computer science is a subset of the broad field. With breakable toys, we are constantly trying to find wrong answers, to push boundaries and discover what can and cannot be done with languages, data structures, APIs and the like.

Perhaps I need to read the section again to fully understand it, but I am at a bit of a loss for the example action being “to create a wiki”. As stated above, I think that better examples for breakable toys would involve familiar projects/programs in new languages, or using different algorithms/data structures. The wiki can be a good start as a “portfolio” to hold all these projects, but on its own I don’t feel as though a wiki is allowing much time out of the comfort zone.

Personally, I feel as though “breakable toys” is an easy concept to understand, but is also a bit more difficult to apply in practice. As I question the pattern’s “classic examples” (like the Wiki), I push forward as the pattern implies as its intention. However, as I leave this comfort zone, I wonder if I stray too far, over my head of expertise (even for a “failure-safe” experience)…

From the blog CS@Worcester – mpekim.code by Mike Morley (mpekim) and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.