The white belt as an apprenticeship pattern is what it sounds like. You are at the beginning of your journey and have a deep understanding of your first language. The problem arises when you are struggling to learn new material and it is harder to piece things together than when you started learning your first programming language. The author relates the solution back to Star Wars quoting Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned”. By doing so, this accelerates the learning process because you don’t try to relate things back to your current language but instead connect neurons together when trying to understand the new concepts you are learning.

I agree with the many things the author taught in this apprenticeship pattern. That too is how I learn new tools and technologies on my own but on the other hand, I always try to relate it back to my strongest, most knowledgeable language, and see if there are similar concepts and if there are ways to carry out a task more efficiently.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Dcanton Blog by dcantonblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I thought the title of The Long Road would make for an interesting pattern to read, so I chose it for this particular post. This pattern describes the path that a craftsman will have to take to become a master throughout their career. This is specific to becoming a master of software development and not particularly for what is traditional success in a career path that we as newly graduating software engineers are “expected” to follow.

For this reason, I honestly disagree with the general idea of this pattern completely. The pattern does make it clear that this is the path specifically for people whose life goal is to become the best at software development and does not seek anything else out of a career in software development. I don’t see this as the norm, or generally good advice in any regard. I also feel that it is important to state that this is merely my opinion, but also one that I strongly believe in. From everything that I read about software developers who stick strictly to software development throughout their careers, they often burn out but also feel that it is too late in their careers to do anything else. These are engineers in their late 40’s and 50’s who have been working for the same company for well over a decade and feel that their knowledge in software development is so narrow because of a lack of exposure to other tech and other business domains. While this is not always the case, this is just what I’ve read and have been exposed to personally.

The pattern also preaches how admiral it is to stick to this strictly developer mindset and how money and promotions should not be a focus for you. While I think that this is important to not be the only focus in a career, this is just silly. Promotions and salary should not be a measure of your success but they should be something we all seek, and a goal for people to strive for throughout their careers. The way this pattern is worded, it seems to try to even nudge readers away from positions like architects where you aren’t specifically writing code on a day to day basis. It wants readers to avoid big picture positions and exclusively stick to coding. There is always more to learn in coding and we should all do something we love, but coding should not be the only aspiration for our careers. For that reason, this article has not changed how I will approach my career, but possibly reinforced the goals I previously had.

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.

This method talks about how indulging in your own artistic nature isn’t always the best option even if you think the product would turn out better if you did it this way. If you are being paid to build something that will solve a problem, this method of Craft over Art explains you need to really consider the situation at hand. In this method, the situation that is discussed is that you believe that you are able to do something outstanding and fantastic that will impress your colleagues. In this situation, you are building something for a user. You shouldn’t be indulging in artistic expression. A lot of the times when we are handed with a task, we can sometimes think about the most outstanding ways to do something, rather than just to get the task done. This can go two ways. Doing something outstanding for a task can be great and have it’s benefits, but what will it cost the effectiveness of it? On the other hand, we can do the task at hand and that will be that. We won’t be able to put any personal expression in it, but is that a bad thing? Of course it isn’t a bad thing. This method seems to be very similar to function over form.

It is a matter of situational awareness. This is something I really enjoyed from this article. Make more straightforward choices and do not try to “sugar coat” solutions. As soon as you start making unfavorable trade offs in certain scenarios, the outcome will not always be as you like. in other words if you want a straightforward answer, you should provide a straight forward solution. Even though this isn’t always the case, I learned that you should always try your best to just try and perform the basic tasks first without adding anything extra or unique. Quality takes time, but having the correct operations in a product is what can make all the difference.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Amir Adelinia's Computer Science Blog by aadelinia1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this weeks blog post I will be looking into the pattern where are you told to “Stay in the Trenches”. Here you are advised to stay in the trenches even if you are offered release off the front lines into a much safer area. What does this mean in a modern day environment well you are on the “front line” to say of a programming job where you in a “grunt” position where basic programming duties fall upon you. One day you are offered a promotion where you will no longer be programming or doing to say the “dirty work” but in a more comfortable position. As it says in the pattern that most people always assume a promotion into management is associated with success. Thinking that if anyone is offered a position like that it’s a no brainier to take, meaning you are doing good.  The reason going into a management position where you are out of the trenches is that your mastery fades due to you not practicing it anymore. To counter this maybe working with your employer to find other rewards for your good work whether that be more pay or other nontraditional technical leadership roles. If your employer is inflexible then it is perhaps better to seek opportunities elsewhere. This pattern is very interesting to me as it makes a lot of sense to stay in the trenches for experience rather than dwindle. It also falls upon the person to decide whether or not they want to stay on the front line or go up the ladder into a management position.  Someone may feel more comfortable or even get more out of a management position instead of being a front line programmer. But again, that is all up to the individual and isn’t really predetermined in my mind. It all depends on what you want to do with your career and so forth so its hard to tell if I could see myself applying this method to a real life situation.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Matt's Blog by mattyd99 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For the seventh week’s reading, I chose to read the pattern, Concrete Skills. This pattern focused on the problem where you want to work on a talented team to learn more and improve yourself. However, the risk of hiring someone who may not contribute directly to the work and could be a baggage is too high. The solution to this is to “acquire and maintain” concrete skills. Examples of these concrete skills are as listed “writing build files in various popular languages, knowledge of various popular open source frameworks like Hibernate and Struts, basic web design, JavaScript, and the standard libraries in your language of choice”. The objective of these concrete skills is to present enough understanding of what you can do on day one. This will provide a chance where your likelihood of being hired is increased. However, when you are hired, you do not have to repeat the steps in the future because you likely have built a reputation and portfolio with your current job. As such, credibility has been established and should prove to future teams that you can be useful on day one.

What I found interesting about this pattern is that it mentions “getting past crude HR filters and managers who construct teams by playing buzzword bingo”. This relates to stories I heard of HR or managers who do not have enough knowledge to do the hiring but is placed in a position to do so. As such, they would deploy tricks and systems, or “filters” in order to find the people they need. Another interesting point brought up by this pattern is the action provided at the bottom. It states that we should note discrete skills that could be useful right away for the team that you want to join. I do believe this is a good strategy to be on top of knowing what skills you can bring to the table.

This pattern has not caused me to change the way I think about the intended profession because this also useful for other professions. The process of hiring people onto a team is always a risk in one way or another. Systems are brought into place because they want to avoid issues off the bat from a new hire, as such you have to demonstrate that you can do the job they expect of you.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Progression through Computer Science and Beyond… by Johnny To and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Retreat into Competence pattern describes what you should do when you feel overwhelmed with how little you know. Every apprentice will eventually feel ignorant or incompetent compared to the craftsmen they will meet. This should not be a reason to worry as it is a normal and inevitable phenomenon. However, when it happens you should retreat briefly into your competence. What this means is to work on something that you already know very well in order to regain some confidence and realize how much you’ve learned since you began your journey. This pattern is relevant for people who are struggling or stretched beyond their ability. If you find yourself in this position, you may need to take a step back before you can continue going forward. However, it is important to realize that this pattern is only a short-term fix so that you don’t surrender to the comfort of working only on things that you know very well.

I enjoyed reading this pattern and found it to be useful because it is applicable to everybody at one point or another. Reading this pattern reminded me of impostor syndrome, which is when somebody persistently feels like a fraud despite evidence of their competence. I think this is something that a lot of computer science students feel since there is so much information to learn and the technology and tools we use are always changing. I think that this pattern is great advice for someone who has a case of impostor syndrome or simply feels overwhelmed by their work. Taking a step back and working on something that you’re comfortable with will allow you to clear your head and regain your composure. It is important to remind yourself from time to time how much you actually know and realize that many things you do easily now once seemed impossibly complicated. Retreating into your competence will help you spring forward when you go back to new challenges. I’m glad that I read this pattern as this advice will definitely help whenever I feel lost or overwhelmed in the future. I now know that in situations like that it will help to retreat into competence for a little while.

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

For this week’s blog I have read the “Learn How You Fail” article of the textbook. The context of this chapter is failure is inevitable, how will I learn from my failures to prevent them in the future? The context set up for the problem is that we learn from our successes and we are successful because of our successes but we also still suffer from our weaknesses and our weaknesses lead to failures.  This rings true with me as I understand that I do not know everything there is to know about software and software development. How I view this is to learn from my failures and learn how to prevent them in the future. I understand that I will fail eventually, as I do not know everything. I understand that I also will learn from the mistakes I have made and the failures I have encountered and I will lean how to prevent them in the future so that I will never have to see the same failure twice in my career. The solution that the textbook is proposing for this is try to identify your failures or areas that your fail before you do fail. Being a self preventative at failing will help myself not encounter failure as much in my future. One point that I really enjoyed was learn what trips you up and become conscious of it. This is a great way to prevent failure because if you encounter or something or know you will soon encounter something that often tends to get you to trip up, hopefully if you realize that is coming down the line you will have ample time to correct the issue before it becomes an actual issue that will result in failure. If you are able to avoid this failure, then you can consider yourself successful. And as we learned earlier, we learn from our successes and we are successful because of them. When we avoid failure we can consider it a success. We need to understand that we cannot become crippled or frustrated by our fear of failure. We have to understand where we fail and learn how to stop ourselves from failure instead of fearing it until it strikes. I have learned a lot from this article and I hope to avoid failure in the future by using the skills I have learned here.

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.