The apprenticeship pattern “The Long Road” is a pattern for those aspiring to become master software craftsmen. For these people, the path that should be taken differs from what is expected from them. Rather than trying to climb the wealth ladder by taking every promotion you can get and enter a less programming-oriented role, you should continue walking on “The Long Road” by focusing on learning and long-term growth.

This pattern is really interesting because it’s a path that focuses entirely on honing your craft rather than salary. I’m sure most people would jump at every opportunity that offered them more money, regardless of what the job actually entailed, so long as they considered it a “step up.” This is a different, legitimate path to take, but it won’t necessarily be the same path as the one to master software craftsmanship. It’s entirely possible that in the long term, focusing on learning and long-term growth would get you “further” down the path of mastering software craftsmanship.

I’m still not entirely sure if it’s the path that I want to take, as it’s difficult to pass up short-term gains. It’s easy to say that you want to walk the long road, but when facing a fork in the road it may be hard to continue. Although, I’ve heard many stories of people who took a higher paying job only to end up regretting it due to lack of growth, poor work-life balance, boring work, etc. That being said, I don’t think that I’ve experienced the industry enough to decide what path to walk. So it’s difficult to say whether I agree or disagree with the pattern, but focusing on improving yourself would likely not lead you down the wrong path.

Imagining strange roles that you could be in 10, 20, 30, or 40 years from now and what you did to end up at those points is an interesting exercise that I think would help people figure out what they want to do in life. Obviously it’s not necessarily guaranteed that you would have a breakthrough from just thinking about it, but you might realize that you don’t like the path that you’re on right now or maybe your dream role has an entirely different starting point from where you are now.

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

Whenever you are new to a team, it an be very nerve racking because you do not want to mess up a single thing. This mindset is perfectly normal and makes sense.  This pattern discusses newcomers into a project and what to do in this environment. For starters, it’s always important to make good relationships with your team. The situation is that you are a new apprentice on project and the team is unsure of you. You want to find ways to contribute to the teams work but you can’t overdue it. This pattern explains that y ou should volunteer yourself for simple but necessary tasks. There are always going to be certain tasks that your team will need to get done one way or another, and even though they are simple tasks, they can often enable for the future success of whatever project you are working on. When taking these tasks, you should still pump out a high quality job. Showing that you can perform even basic tasks at a very high standard of quality shows your team that you care about what you are doing even if it is just small tasks. Sometimes these tasks can be just as vitally important as other tasks. Some examples of these tasks are maintaining the build system, production support, responding to maintenance requests, bug fixing, code review, or even setting up the project wiki. However, it can be tough to do if you spent a lot of time and money on computer science education. The reality of it is that when you get into the workplace, our education is worth a lot less. When you join a computer team, getting hired is different from joining a team. Your firsts takes should be made to send a message. However, there could be some potential downfalls to this pattern. It could keep you permanently doing these mundane tasks for the team and never giving yourself a chance to expand to bigger and better things yourself. But if you do the tasks that sometimes your team may not want to do, it could give you a sort of priority on what you can do next for the team and open new opportunities for your team to see how worthy you are.

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.

The section titled Find Mentors discusses finding people in your field who are seasoned and have a lot of experience to offer, and to reach out to these veterans of the field and try to gain from them what knowledge they have to offer. It is a simple idea, but as the text explains, it is intimidating to just ask someone to offer their services and mentor you. It is a lot to ask, and not everyone is up for it after all. Besides, it is challenging to know who is even a good mentor, and who is not.

I consider many of my professors at Worcester State mentors to an extent. However, I wouldn’t say I’ve ever had the kind of mentor-ship detailed within the section. I can definitely relate to the anxieties listed about reaching out to someone. It can seem weird and uncomfortable. I suppose it is just a feeling you have to conquer if you want the best for yourself, however. After all, nobody else is going to ask for you.

From my perspective, Find Mentors is such an important pattern because there is a limit to how much most people can learn independently. There is such a huge advantage to having a resource like someone who has been through all the challenges you are facing and can solve some of the problems that come up. I hope that in my future I have the chance to meet someone who can offer me these advantages. Actually getting into the field is a huge hurdle, and having someone who has been through it and could coach me on how to navigate it would be incredible. It is just something I am going to have to search for.

Overall, Find Mentors seems like one of, if not the most important apprenticeship pattern I’ve read about and discussed so far. After all, finding a compatible mentor that is willing to dedicate the right amount of time for you would result in huge growth and development. It is hard to obtain this ideal, but it is something worth striving for.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Let's Get TechNICKal by technickal4 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For this weeks blog post I will be discussing the pattern known as “Sweep the Floor”. Sweeping the Floor is about you starting from the bottom and then getting into the more complex tasks. This being you contributing to simpler tasks, learning from these and becoming more skilled then graduating into larger more complex tasks. Imagine you are an new apprentice on a project, unsure where you stand compared to others on the team and they are unsure about you as well. You want to earn your place on this team, contributing where you can, gaining their trust and growing in the craft essentially. To do this you could simply volunteer for something simple that is necessary to complete. This is a good starting way to contribute to a foreign team and to the teams success early on by showing you can do high quality jobs even for simple matters. Skimping on quality here could lead to trouble later on when it turns out later that this part is actually very important. Some various examples of these tasks include maintaining the build system, production support, responding to maintenance requests, bug fixing, code review, setting up a project wiki and so forth. Basically you would be focusing on the edges of the system where less risk lies rather than the heart of the project where the stress and complexity would be. But this of course could prove tougher to swallow if you have spent a lot of time and money in a computer science degree. The moment leading up to your career in theory has been doing all of the said above tasks almost just without pay. Another negative aspect of this would be you ending up as the teams gopher, condemned to do menial tasks no else wants to do. You may find yourself intimidated by doing anything other than sweeping the floor, feeling only comfortable doing this. There is also danger in that you may not be able to develop appreciation for bigger projects due to the smaller menial tasks you are accustomed to. In short finding the tasks nobody wants to do or complains about and creatively resolving these problems in ways that exceed peoples expectations will allow you to slowly soar above, something that most including myself can get behind.

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 tenth and final week of reading, I chose to read the pattern, Use the Source. This pattern focuses on the problem that without the presence of good source code to study, practice, and emulate, you can’t get better, and you might continue developing bad habits you didn’t know you have. The solution provided is to find another person’s code and start reading them. This will enable you to learn how they wrote their code and understand the thought process that made that code. The recommendation includes examining open source projects and examining them for why they work in such a way. Also, to attempt and refactor codebases to understand the decisions programmers make and why they didn’t choose a different way. This process also leads to why there is appreciation for code reviews and pair programming. Having other people read your code, you read theirs, everyone can learn from each other. Allowing yourself to get a feel for good and bad code, you can develop a better understanding of yourself and how to improve.

This pattern is interesting because I never thought about using open source projects as a way of learning. I always took open source projects as a way of getting things from the community and as a way of contributing back to the project. However, using it as a way of reading well maintained code, reading practice, and understanding the thought process is a creative way of using publicly available projects.

This pattern is also useful because once you have seen the code, you might remember it for later as the code is not textbook examples. Examining, dissecting, and understanding code from real world projects allow you to see more, retain more, and most likely apply it in your own code later on.

The pattern has caused me to change the way I think about my intended profession because there are many different ways of improving yourself as a software developer. Being on the look out for readily available information and tools and being creative with the resources you do have access to can make a difference. As such, this pattern is incredibly helpful at showing that sometimes resources for learning can be right in front of you, you just weren’t creative enough to know it was there from the start.

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.

For this post, I decided to read the pattern “The White Belt”. This pattern talks about the ability of a software developer, and craftsman, to unlearn something and use an entirely different approach to solve a problem in order to maintain the ability to learn. The pattern talks about the idea of getting stuck at what seems to be your peak potential but that this is merely because you aren’t trying something completely new that would force you to try to solve the problem with a new approach.

I agree with the overall premise of this pattern. Personally, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to try to learn new languages without internally trying to write Java in language X. This summer I had an internship where one of my projects was to make a prototype program for a chat bot using Microsoft’s existing AI technology. This meant that I had to veer away from my good friend Java and attempt to use a new language, C#. I honestly don’t remember that much about C# other than that it looks like a lot like Java and I was able to manipulate the code so that it worked. I spent the entirety of the project focused on how it was similar to Java and how to write Java in C# and never even remotely became a master of the language. Granted, it was a short term project (roughly 4-6 weeks and 20-30 hours a week), so mastery was never feasible. The problem is that if I have to work on another C# project at some point in my career, I will have to start over. I never unlearned my Java knowledge to write in C#.

This coming summer, I’ll be starting a position where I will almost exclusively be writing in C++, a language I have never written a line of code in. Before I start the job, I’m giving myself time to learn the basics, but I know that I’ll need guidance along the way from the subject matter experts at this new company. There will most certainly be moments where I am completely dumbfounded about how to solve a particular problem, or what is wrong with my solution. I’ve learned that over the last couple of years of interning, and at those companies I was using a language I thought I was pretty comfortable in (Java).

Being able to put on the white belt and learn from the masters is one of the things you hear about from everyone in almost every field of technical work. I plan to put on my white belt as soon as I walk in the door at my new company.

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.

If my previous blog posts haven’t reflected it enough, I am definitely nervous to step into the professional software development field. This is likely mostly due to my case of imposter syndrome, where I think of myself as less capable or knowledgeable than I actually am. On another hand, though, I have also been overwhelmed by the thought of being behind other team members or colleagues in terms of knowledge and experience, even though everyone will, and should, be aware of this gap.

This week’s apprenticeship pattern, Expose Your Ignorance, further reassured me that learning new things and not necessarily knowing everything right away on the job is a normal occurrence. Everyone on the team is under pressure to submit work by a certain time, and when there is a “weaker link” who may not be on the same page as other team members, it can certainly cause some tension and perhaps anxiety for this team member. However, in order to best confront this issue, the team member should break down their walls hiding their ignorance toward the subject of the project, as well as let everyone else know about of how much they know and how much they still need to learn. It is suggested that one of the best ways to show this ignorance of any topic is to ask questions, as well as remain transparent when working with others so that the team member’s level of expertise is not misinterpreted. The apprentice should not only disclose this information, but also emphasize their willingness to learn and catch up with the rest of the team.

I already had a feeling that upon entering the workforce, senior developers and other colleagues would have some sort of understanding that I will not have as much experience as them, and that I will need to spend time catching up to what they know. This pattern was great to allow me to realize that I shouldn’t be afraid to let everyone know where my knowledge of our work stands, even if it requires further progress to strive towards everyone else’s level of understanding.

Thanks for reading!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Hi, I'm Kat. by Kat Law and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.