Category Archives: Week 9

Pattern : Sweep the Floor

Sweep The Floor 

When reading this pattern, i was a little puzzled the first time but after a second read through i understood what the author was insinuating. No one hands over the most important tasks on a project to a graduate they just hired. That would be putting the future of the company in jeopardy. This is mainly because you do not know how competent a person is without seeing their actual work.

Summary

In this chapter, the author brings to light how apprentices can gain trust of their respective teams and build their way to becoming master craftsmen on the team. By “Sweeping The Floor” newcomers or  new hires are able to build a portfolio performing tasks that the other team members would  not like to do. And when performing these tasks, they are to do it with a sense of urgency and purpose. By ways of such means, you are able to build trust, contribute to the team and also demonstrate your level of competency and understanding of the  team tasks.  We often forget that before we get to celebrate the big victory, having multiple little victories builds ones self confidence and skills that would eventually contribute to the “big wins”. 

The author did mention the value of our college degree once we graduate and i think this is the most surreal thing i read from the entire chapter. Knowing that all the time and effort invested in acquiring my degree only goes to raise expectations on what i could potentially bring to the team but doesn’t solidify me as knowing how to develop a software. with this said, the only way to solidify and earn my teams respect as a  programmer is to create well organized code and programs when i work on the less impacting task i am assigned or i volunteer for. Of course “sweeping the floor” is hard when i have completed my degree in hopes of becoming a full time software developer but the key is that, i would still have an opportunity and by doing a tremendous job on assigned tasks, i will be able to make a case for my skills and earn the respect of my  team members. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Le Blog Spot by Abranti3 Dada Kay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Pattern : The Deep End

Chapter Overview

This chapter was especially exciting to read because it encompassed many of my personal life mottos and philosophies. The author begins by talking about avoiding safe steps but instead to challenge ourself with bigger things. Growing up, my mother always motivated me to do my best and to continue to move forward. she also emphasized on seeing every task as a stepping stone to treasures that would enrich my personal repertoire of experiences and tenacity.  I believe this is what the author was attempting to address in this chapter. In the absence of fear, the sky becomes the limit and everything becomes doable.

Thoughts

 I do agree greatly with most of the authors input on the deep end pattern. I believe that in the absence of growth and challenges, we are often succumbed to mediocracy and complacency.  We need to continue to learn and take-up new opportunities that challenge and cause us to fall out of our comfort zone. The feeling of accomplishment is exponentially amplified when we seek new challenges to conquer and complete each day. The life of a software developer has a starting point but no clear end point as illustrated in the previous post. To continue to remain relevant and up to par with the industry standards, we need to constantly build and elevate our skill so that nothing will take up by surprise.

Although we are advised to seek out projects and task that  challenge us, biting off more than we can chew will only cause us to loose our breath and end up getting it wrong , but to avoid this, we can implement mentorships and find experienced role models who can give us good guidelines and support should our going get tough. Also we need to take educated risks by understanding what will be needed to get the task accomplished. Its one thing to blindly tackle an issue without fully comprehending its ramifications but its also an even bigger issue when you have already jumped into the task but have no source for guidance and support.  “Risks are opportunities seen through the half-shut eyes of fear” as the author said but understanding what we are capable of is an even greater tool for success. 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Le Blog Spot by Abranti3 Dada Kay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Walking the Long Road: Craft Over Art

In this Apprenticeship Pattern “Craft Over Art”, it explains the relationship between the craft and the art of a craftsmen’s work. As an apprentice, it is important to understand how much of an impact both aspects have for the work that they produce for their customer. In the software development field, most of the work that you would produce would be for the customer or client that requests the product. With this being said, the customer or client that requests the product will have certain specifications that they want you, the craftsmen, to make, or they could ask for you to make a product that is useful for them.

“Craftsmanship is built upon strong relationships. Focus on delivering value to your customer over advancing your own self-interests. As a craftsman you are primarily building something that serves the needs of others, not indulging in artistic expression. After all, there’s no such thing as a starving craftsman. As our friend Laurent Bossavit put it: ‘For a craftsman to starve is a failure; he’s supposed to earn a living at his craft’. You need to do your best work in ways that place the interests of your customers over your desire to display skill or pad your resume, while still adhering to the minimum standards of competence provided by the software development community. Walking the Long Road means you must balance these conflicting demands. If you starve because you are too much of an artist and your creations are too beautiful to be delivered in the real world, then you have left the craft. 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.”

This idea of deciding craft over art is understandable and this idea stood out to me the most. The software that you make as a software developer must be useful to the customer, otherwise it is a meaningless piece of work.  It is okay to implement the special touches on your work once it has fulfilled its usefulness to the customer and their needs. However, it is not okay to primarily focus on the art aspect over the needs of the customer. You are called craftsmen for a reason, not an artist, and that’s how I view this pattern’s main idea. I completely agree with this pattern’s idea of craft over art and I feel that every software developer should consider the “craft” a priority over the “art” of their work first.

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

Backing Up

In light of what happened last week, I decided to make coming up with a strategy for backup a priority on the Massachusetts HOSA website. After all of the work that I put into the design the first and second time around, I do not want to risk losing it again. In many regards, I am thankful that losing the data happened when it did. It has allowed me to improve my habits and develop in a more efficient and sustainable way.

The first thing that I made sure to do once I had restored the design of the website was to make an initial back up of the files and database. Although there are more efficient ways (I’ll explore some of these later), I chose what was easiest at the time and copied the files from the web server to my local hard drive through an FTP client. Through an SSH session, I dumped the contents of the database to a .sql file and transferred this file to my local computer, again through FTP. I am now far less paranoid making changes, because I know that I have this backup to fallback on should I mess anything up beyond repair. This backup contains the entire base site, with all design completed per original specifications.

After meeting to discuss the next steps, I will undoubtedly be making more changes to the site. Rather than having to initiate these backups manually each time using the process I described above, I would like to have some way of automatically backing up changes on some sort of a regular schedule. After researching plugins that could accomplish this, I found UpdraftPlus. I wanted to use a plugin rather than something server-side because we will be migrating the WordPress installation to a different server following development. By using a plugin rather than some sort of cron job or script on the server I would eliminate the need to completely reconfigure the backup service after the migration.

After initial setup, I ran a forced backup using the UpdraftPlus plugin. Despite a few files that the tool was unable to backup due to incorrect file permissions, the backup ran smoothly and stored all of the pertinent website data, including a database backup, on my Google Drive account. The only thing that has to be done at this point is to transfer the backup location to someone who will be able to access them if needed following development. I’m very happy to have found a solution to the problem of backing up, and looking forward to not worrying about breaking the website.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Breakable Toys

Those describing the Breakable Toys apprenticeship pattern assert the importance of designating a safe-space for failure. But we must accept there is no room for failure on the job. In a professional working environment, many expect us to produce material that works every time. But as depicted in this pattern’s description, failure is necessary in order to grow.

Building breakable toy projects can be a great way to contain, evaluate, and improve upon one’s failure. The idea is to personally design something “on the side” that emulates one or more features you’re working on professionally.

I’ve somewhat already applied this pattern throughout the course of working on the AMPATH project. I’ve developed a few “breakable toys” of my own with the intention of better understanding specific Angular capabilities. My reasoning is as follows: AMPATH uses many Angular functionalities I was previously unfamiliar with. I quickly began to realize I have a whole lot of learning to do.

The concept behind the Breakable Toys pattern seems practical for any Software Developer. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of all programmers have created at least one breakable toy or another. I base this on my personal experience with breakable toys. They have definitely given me a better understanding of the “big picture” behind the AMPATH app. When working on a large project, breaking it down into pieces can give us a better understanding of its overall functionality. We can feel confident evaluating the features in a breakable toy through trial and error. If the toy breaks beyond recognition, its okay. Whereas breakable toys are disposable, large open source projects like AMPATH are not. It seems a lot safer to evaluate functionalities in an isolated space first.

I would also like to mention the specific action suggested by those describing the Breakable Toys pattern. Personally constructing a wiki from scratch is proposed. I feel this will be very beneficial for me in my future endeavors. Building wikis appear to be great breakable toys to experiment with; we can use them to explore fundamentals such as concurrency, HTTP, REST, and general web development. As I begin transitioning to my professional career, these are fundamentals that I certainly need to become more knowledgeable in.

I’ve recently purchased a website domain and hosting space from InMotion. I don’t have anything on it yet, but my eventual goal after I graduate is to build my own “breakable toy” wiki. I want to do this to become more familiar with web development tools and prepare for job interviews. Further, I am hoping to showcase everything I’ve learned about the AMPATH project in this proposed wiki to help others in the future.

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

Apprenticeship Pattern: Learn How You Fail

This week, I read the apprenticeship pattern “Learn How You Fail”. To quickly summarize, this pattern asked you to stop looking at your successes and start actively seeking your failures and weaknesses in order to learn from them. I really liked the message behind this pattern because it is different from what we are accustomed to. It is normally very easy to focus on getting better at something you are mediocre at, and even easier to focus on getting better at something you are great at, but it is really difficult to confront your shortcomings and approach what you are terrible at. My interpretation of this pattern was that it doesn’t seek to discredit the good aspects of your skills but rather putting a focus on the bad as to make you a better engineer overall.

This is another applicable pattern for me personally because I still have a few areas of weakness in my development skills, even in some of the technologies and languages that I’ve been using many years. I have caught myself opting out for a simpler but worse performing option because I didn’t want to confront an area of weakness needed to implement the better solution. The other key aspect of this pattern in accurate self assessment, asking yourself “am I really this good at X, or is there major room to improve there”. I often find that we normally give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say “Yes we are that good”, and this closes out any potential opportunities to actually improve. What this pattern teaches is to really ask and assess deeply and even ask for an external opinion (via peer review) for areas of weakness.

I agree with this pattern and I plan on implementing this going forward in my career. This pattern should be fairly easy to apply because of its practicality. If you are weak in a skill that will no longer needed, the pattern suggests that you shouldn’t waste your time with that and focus on more important areas of weakness. The only challenge to applying this pattern will be the reluctance to do what we are not good at, but I believe that overcoming this will be much easier if we think about the benefit that will come from fixing our weakest links.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by lphilippeau and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Beginnings of my Map

I’m typically not much of a long-term planner. While I have defined some goals and aspirations, they sometimes seem more like rambling dreams than achievable objectives. Although I may know what I want, defining actionable items for getting there is a different and far more challenging accomplishment. I like to make the most of every day, doing the best that I can and hoping that hard work and positivity will take me somewhere amazing, wherever that may be.

Much like the story told by Desi in the Draw Your Own Map pattern in Hoover and Oshineye’s Apprenticeship Patterns, I have begun my Information Technology career in a sort of hybrid role in Systems/Application Administration. The differences between my experiences so far, thankfully, have been far different from those described by Desi. Rather than facing pressure to concentrate only on furthering the interests of others, I am encouraged to create a valuable experience for myself.

While I am well aware that it is not the responsibility of anyone else, employer, professor, or colleague, to give me a hand out, I am extremely grateful for all of the support that I have received in that regard. I feel as though I have a good sense of my career position  and potential options for the future because of the support that I’ve received and the experiences that I’ve had.

Although I see absolutely no need to consider other paths at this time, the Draw Your Own Map and the stories shared by Desi and Chris were somewhat reassuring. It is comforting to know that even if there comes a time when it may feel like it, you are never really stuck. I feel extremely grateful to currently be in a position where my goals and desires for professional advancement are not only heard and considered, but seem to be top priorities. I am in a supportive, flexible environment, where I’m encouraged to set and work to achieve goals for personal and professional growth, development, and learning. Right now, the possibilities and prospects seem to be wide open. The next step for me is to use this opportunity to discover the values that are important to me.

From the blog CS@Worcester – ~/GeorgeMatthew/etc by gmatthew and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

SPRINT 3

Team Retrospective – Sprint 3

Overview : 

          This was a very pivotal sprint period for us as a team and class because we each began to work on the tasks and duties that we decided to contribute to this project. It seemed like it took forever for us to build traction on this project as a team but once we began to figure out which direction we wanted to go, everything began to speed up and move very quickly. We took upon the task of ensuring an offline service exist within the Ampath application where you would be able to log on and work even if you are offline. After many brainstorming moment and code reviews, realized that we cant even focus on building an up and running module before we try to collaborate with other teams because all are work and tasks have external dependencies on other teams tasks and involved factors that were beyond our control.

What Got Done 

As a team, we were able to accomplish many tasks that we set out to do. Initially, we all wanted to understand the code enough to be able to ring about ideas and how to approach our offline login task. we were able to create an overall architecture/design of offline login feature using Balsamiq. This was a task that was handled and led by George and Mathew. Another thing we decided to do was also look into the bridge designer pattern as it helped us understand and decide which approach we want to take our design’s architecture and functions. After extensive code review we decided finding out which servers  handled the current logon process and the methods would be key in our development of the offline logon process. Once we understand how they have it working , we could implement their methods and get ours up and running.

Conflicts/Issues Moving Forward

As of right now, we as a team have a few issues that need to be addressed in order for us to continue making progress. We realized that we would need to implement a database to be able to test and ensure that what we came up with works. The issue is that one of the teams in the class is also building a database for the project so we are at a point where we feel that we need to amplify communications between the two teams. We did decide to use a  mock/test database to aid us in building what we need and design the UI also and then after that, we would collaborate with the team to make sure that the specs and methods line up so that merging the two modular designs would be easy and compatible.  Through this process, i have learned that to build a software that involves multiple components, you need to communicate with the other teams working on the other components so that in the end, bring the software pieces together does not become too tedious. 

 Looking ahead, i feel as though we have a good grasp of the direction that we want to take our project but need to continue to collaborate and talk with the Ampath team and see if they see eye to eye with our approaches and designs. The next few weeks should be very interesting ! 

 

 

 

From the blog CS@Worcester – Le Blog Spot by Abranti3 Dada Kay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Apprenticeship Pattern – Breakable Toys

The pattern “Breakable Toys” can be found here: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/ch05s03.html

This pattern is a little longer than some of the other patterns I have looked over. Long story short, Breakable Toys is a pattern designed to help you learn. Kind of like Be the Worst but is more focused on you as an individual. The problem is that you are working in a company that can’t afford errors to destroy their data/program/whatever (who can afford that?).  However, the other half of the problem is that you are just learning this stuff and need a safe space to practice. You should create your own safe space project that relates to the problem you need to solve in the company, just at a smaller scale. This pattern tells you you need to build these breakable toys from the ground up to learn the insides and outs. Once you have these breakable toys, they are yours forever to use with other jobs and problems.

I thought this pattern was very useful. I was always told that if I want to learn, I have to do. That’s what this pattern is saying. You have to take the initiative and build these projects in order to learn. The best part is, failing only harms your breakable toy, which you built specifically to be broken!

The first line says “If experience is built upon failure as much as success, then you need a more or less private space where you can seek out failure.” (Oshineye, Hoover) I love this first line because it tells you that failure really is okay. That is how you learn. Being successful on the first try only teaches you what works for this situation but not for others. If you fail, you can learn a whole bunch about what doesn’t work and what does work. I don’t think you should intentionally fail, but failing will help you improve your skills and knowledge (so don’t feel too bad). The most important part about failing is getting back up and trying another approach. I could definitely see myself using this in my intended profession. I get worried all the time about breaking things that are important and this pattern gives you a way around that.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Rookey Mistake by Shane Rookey and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Apprenticeship Patterns – Sustainable Motivations

I think most people would say a career in software development is a pretty damn good choice to make. The field is growing at a rapid pace and jobs within the field typically come with high paying salaries and flexible hours. Because of this, it can be easy to find yourself complacent in your current position and lacking the motivation to continue to learn new topics. You may find yourself thinking “I’m making a six-figure salary and I am very comfortable with my current position. Why would I go out of my way to learn new material?” The pattern Sustainable Motivations in Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman[AP] by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye discusses some ideas on how to prevent/get yourself out of this trap. It also discusses how to avoid some other situations that could potentially prevent you from mastering the craft.

The key to becoming a master software developer is to keep yourself motivated [AP]. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes this motivation can dwindle [AP]. The pattern suggests to keep a list of things that you are motivated by to help remind yourself of what is truly important to you [AP]. I think that this is a great idea. It allows you to keep reality in check. Everyone needs that once in a while. If being considered an expert in your field is on that list, then you should do all in your power to prevent yourself from becoming complacent. If it isn’t and you truly feel that your motivations have changed being an expert is no longer a priority than that is ok. Just don’t give yourself that false intention of wanting to be an expert when in the back of your mind you know your motives are in a different place.

The other thing to keep in mind if you find yourself questioning your motivations and/or if you still want to be in the software field is to simply give it some time [AP]. There are going to be bad weeks at work. There are going to be weeks where you are working nights and weekends to meet a deadline that you knew from the beginning wasn’t realistic. There are going to be weeks where you question management’s decisions. I can go on, but you get the point. Not every week at work is going to be all hunky dory. Be mindful not to make a life changing knee-jerk decision that you may regret. Give it some time and your motivation will probably return.

 

Link to pattern in book: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/ch03s03.html

 

From the blog CS@Worcester – README by Matthew Foley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.