My next post is on the problem Sweep the Floor from chapter 4, which has to do with when you are getting started on a group project and want to be able to contribute to the team and grow your own skills. This problem got my interest the most in the chapter because it is a problem that I have when I am in anything that needs a group effort, usually projects, and I think this is a common problem for people. Whether it be a project for school or work, a team based sport, or other activities that involve teams, contributing to the activity and earning trust from your team are the main concerns.

I tend to worry about not doing well and holding the team back, and the solution offered matches what I usually do to prove myself. The recommended solution is to start with the “simple, unglamorous, yet necessary, tasks” and work your way through your tasks to show what you’re capable of. When it comes to contributing and earning your teams trust, the two concerns usually go together because it will be your contributions that help you earn trust, and you can improve yourself as you work and do your share of the workload. The type of tasks you do are also important because what you complete can show your capabilities, and you will want to do some of them that you may not enjoy but are necessary for the project to show you are willing to do them.

While it is important for you to contribute to the team, you want to avoid getting to the point where you end up doing more work than others, or are the only one working on the “simple” tasks that the others do not want to do. Either you are the one stuck with those tasks, or those are the only tasks you are doing and are not doing any of the higher level tasks and can’t improve yourself. It can be difficult to contribute that way, and you won’t learn that much. Team projects can be beneficial to the members working together and improving them all at a higher rate than working alone, but it can also be difficult to divide the work and for new members to the team to contribute.

From the blog Jeffery Neal's Blog by jneal44 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Craft over Art is a drastic change in tone from the rest of the patterns I have covered. All of the previous patterns I have read have been about how to advance myself as a developer, while this pattern is more how to act as a developer. Craft over Art stresses the importance of providing a useful product for a customer instead of a wildly experimental one that might not work. I would argue that this still is about advancing myself as a developer, but in a different, more practical way.

Obviously I should continue to do everything else discussed in these patterns, but I feel like Craft over Art will be the most immediately useful. This pattern can be implemented day one of your first job. It also is the most important pattern for your employer, since they care about actual products. I would imagine many apprentices are very excited to enter the industry and make something amazing, but this is simply not the reality of the profession. Real customers want products that work, do not need complicated maintenance, and are industry standard.

Craft over Art then goes on to explain that when you are rushed to deliver a product you must make compromises between beauty and utility. These compromises will inevitably lead you to a mistake, and you will need to fix it. This is a good thing, the pattern argues, since only by fixing things do we realize which compromises are the correct one.

This idea is a liberating one for me. The fact that I need to mess up in order to learn means that people will expect me to mess up. I feel like this takes a weight off my shoulders. The stress of working on real products with real customers is one I think is very common.

I am glad I read this pattern for my last blog post. I did not plan it, but it was a very nice surprise. Over the course of a semester reading about how I should improve myself, it is a nice shift to learn about how to provide a useful product for my customers.

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

Stay in the Trenches is about how you must stay on your path and focus on learning rather than promotions. If you are offered a promotion which takes you away from what you want to do, you should reject that promotion. This of course does not mean that you should never accept promotions or advancement, but you should always remain focused on what you want to do with your career. This pattern implies that you want to program, and I do, but I can see this pattern applied to many more disciplines.

Over the course of all these patterns one thing has been emphasized more than anything else: as an apprentice, your primary goal should be to learn. This pattern spells that out more than any other. This pattern is a very tough pill to swallow, but it is very good advice. Sometimes you need to be told things you don’t want to hear, and should listen to advice from people who have made mistakes before you.

I like this pattern since I am a very promotion oriented person. I can see myself taking the quick promotion and I needed this pattern to guide me on the right path. Throughout my working career I have taken the promotion when I should not have. This is different from what Stay in the Trenches is talking about, but it shows what kind of person I am. I need to be aware of that going into the future.

One thing I wonder about is when should I take the promotion? You are always able to learn, when have I learned enough? Fortunately I don’t have to worry about this for a while, and I think that it is an easier decision than I’m thinking it is. Right now I do not have the experience to tell what I want to do, and what I’m ok with not doing.

The pattern also suggests that instead of taking the promotion you should work with your employer to find other, more advanced tasks that you can take on. I like this idea since it allows you to continue programming, but it also might not offer the same pay or benefits.

Overall I like this pattern, it is one of the better ones I have read so far. I think my favorite patterns are the ones that tell me things I don’t want to hear; things I already agree with is not really teaching me anything. It is easy to take the advice of work hard, but not so much to pass up promotions.

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

In 1980, I attended a 3-month course at the Center for Computer Education in Lynnfield and was taught “Structured COBOL programming”. I then worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Welfare for 4 years, using COBOL as my first programming language. I had no real mentors here but did make a number of long-term friends. The lack of a mentor made it hard for me to progress as much as I did later in my career, where I had the advantage of working with some really smart people, so it is good that I learned to love computers early on at this job. I was pretty self-directed. Towards the end of my time at this job, I was able to work with some PL/I consultants who showed me what a “real” programming language was like. With this new knowledge, I was able to change jobs, and to double my salary first at MGH, and then at SEI corporation.

Around this time, I attended a course in PASCAL at UMASS Boston, and a PL/I course at Boston University. These jobs had people who were able to teach me some new tricks, but I also was able to return the favor to them. This lack of mentorship in my early years I look back on as a benefit. I was really “thrown into the deep end” in many places, which really helped me to keep learning as much as I could on my own. If I hadn’t continued to love computing, I would have certainly left my career in its early years.

I really didn’t get “Mentored” until I became a consultant, taught myself C and the Windows 3.1 SDK, and went to work at MIT. Through my consulting years, I worked at 10 to 15 companies, doing Windows UI development and SQL database work. These positions were both enterprise-level and desktop-level. There were about a half dozen people I considered mentors at these assignments, and I also sometimes acted in a mentor role to more junior employees.

I think it was fortunate that I was able to work at so many diverse organizations, because I became familiar with many new programming languages and software products, as well as obtaining a broad view of many diverse industries.

So, starting with COBOL, which I look back on and realize was a terrible language, I entered a journey which would continue to get more and more interesting as time went on. I have programmed in C, C++, C#.NET, PL/I, SQL, and a few others, but didn’t really feel I had found “The Language” for me until I started developing with Java which allowed me to convert to mobile Android development.

From the blog cs@worcester – (Twinstar Blogland) by Joe Barry and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

One thing that the field of Computer Science is rather notorious for is that, for new learners, the entry level may seem incredibly low for someone who is interested in pursuing programming in any degree. Given the abundance of freely available resources for learning programming languages, this should not be that much of a surprise. It is easy for someone to find a tutorial online on how to implement inheritance in JAVA, with such tutorial presenting this concept through some oversimplified example. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing; it is important to learn things in smaller steps. However, some software development apprentices may take to simply memorizing the knowledge they acquire and how to simply implement the tools available to them without much understanding, thus acquiring only a superficial understanding compared to a deeper, more thorough understanding, which in the future may become a habit that can interfere during the development of bigger projects. This situation is introduced as a pattern titled “Dig Deeper”.

What this pattern means for an apprentice developer is that, oftentimes, they may have found themselves in part of the development where their technical knowledge at that point in time may seem to be lacking because the superficial knowledge they have gained during the learning process was not sufficient to provide meaningful contributions in a project of a larger scale, especially in a professional environment. For example, someone who may be working on deploying a web-based application may run into this pattern. The apprentice, though they may know a bit about how REST APIs may work, they may still find themselves struggling because the project they are working on presents concepts that are impossible to cover in a simple tutorial. The apprentice may know how to implement functionality on the backend, but have neglected to get a  deeper, understanding of how such functionality may impact the frontend. Thus, when something in the frontend fails because of the backend, the apprentice may provide a solution that in the long-term does little to solve that problem. Overall, an apprentice who, regardless of their proficiency in their area of expertise, does not take the proper care to understand how such expertise may interact with other areas can hinder the long-term maintainability of a project, as well as have a negative impact on the apprentice’s own learning process.

While it is impossible to be an expert on every single concept and tool that exists ,not only within one’s area of expertise, but also for every single area that may constitute a bigger project, it is still important to take the time to gain a deeper understanding of how other areas work in conjunction to one’s expertise.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CompSci Log by sohoda and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Similar to prior weeks, you have a basic set of skills, and your understanding of software development is narrow and small. Expanding your bandwidth allows you to further expand your horizons and learn more. The best step to solve this is to take in new information, but it is important to do so carefully, as it is easy to be overwhelmed in the information intake.

Some examples of ways to gather the new information is through following software development blogs, following software developers on social medias like Facebook and Twitter, and subscribing to a software development mailing list, just to name a few. There are also many hundreds of online courses and videos as well, so there is no shortage of information to be had. Following software developers can key you into new technologies before they become widely popular, which can give you a head start into the game before others. There are also national conferences that you could attend as well, and another great thing to do is to read any books some of the speakers have written in the past, so you can help get an idea of what they will be talking about and their software development history.

However, it is just as important to know when to expand your bandwidth then just how to as I explained above. It is possible to get stuck with the gathering of information, and it can easily happen where you get stuck researching and learning and never go back to creating any software. It is important to use this skill to accelerate your learning, but it is also important to not get stuck with the learning, learning is a means to an end, you must come back when you are done with the learning. Usually it is recommended to not spend more than a few months with this learning process, as that allows you to not get stuck in the learning process, as it is not too long, but it is also not short enough to the point where you do not learn much of anything at all.

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

The pattern I have chosen today is one about kindred spirits which is when one finds themselves in an unfavorable situation regarding the workplace they reside in or the kind of organization they work for, they should seek some sort of help from someone else. That someone else should be a mentor to you, someone that you want try to emulate, feel intimidated by while also feeling secure around them. These people will help you on your journey on becoming better software programmer whether it be by sharpening your skills or even just giving some extra motivation for you to push on.

The pattern mentions that on the long road, nobody walks alone and that some sort of cooperation is well needed for you to push on with your career. The path one has taken so far should be proof of that, you should have always had someone to help stimulate your learning with your teachers and classmates available for help. They have done a great deal of work helping you realize your career and you will soon see these go away as your enter your career. This means that you will need to start to put in work yourself to build new connections to new mentors and friends that have similar career interests. The sooner this is done, the better so that way the experience is gained earlier and you are setup before any new hardships happen.

I myself should start looking into different ways on getting of connecting to a camaraderie of those who are looking into similar lines of work regarding software programming. There are tons of different sites to look through and resources to use to obtain these connections and there are probably several in the university that I can use. The pattern does mention of it creating an irregular meetup of craftsman in the region that eventually becomes large enough to be self sustaining. I disagree on getting such thing to happen to be easier than one might think and that it is probably something the average craftsman wouldn’t be able to create. I myself don’t see myself creating such a group.

From the blog CS@Worcester – kbcoding by kennybui986 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this week, I chose to read the pattern ‘Practice, Practice, Practice’ from Chapter 5: Perpetual Learning. The name is pretty self explanatory as to what the pattern will be on, practicing. I originally chose this pattern because it’s something that we need to reinforce within ourselves in order to get better at something, for coding especially. This is something I still struggle with due to my lack of drive and motivation but everyday is another day to push myself. Any way, the context of this pattern is wanting to get better at the things you do, to develop concrete skills. Again, just looking at the title gave away the context of this pattern, but that was it.

For the problem of the pattern, it is being unable to learn from your mistakes due to the performance of you daily programming activities, you feel like you’re always on stage. I assume this is in context of a job, but I haven’t experienced this problem yet so knowing about it ahead of time is going to help me down the line. For the solution of this pattern, you want to be able to practice without interruptions and in an environment that makes you comfortable making mistakes. This seems like an easy solution but in practice I’d imagine it’s hard. The solution also mentioned having a mentor to watch you over your practice and provide feedback. This is something I’d be interested in doing but I lack the humility to have a mentor watch me and provide me feedback, I’m always trying to do things on my own. I also dread looking at feedback because I feel I always mess something up, but I believe a pattern in the one of the previous chapters mentioned to put aside your ego, so I’ll have to go look at that one again.

Finally, for the action of the pattern, something I don’t write about often but I thought it would fit here, is to read one of the books that was previously mentioned in this pattern and take an exercise from it or make one yourself. The exercise should ideally be slightly harder than you can easily solve. You’ll then do this over 4 weeks and record your solution every time and over the 4 weeks you should observe how your solutions evolve. I thought this was an interesting take on practicing coding that I’ve never heard about. I usually just one and done exercises but repeating a exercise really cements it into your head so I’d imagine this way is much more beneficial to me.

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