The context given here is that You want to get better at the things you do and you want to develop concrete skills in new areas. The problem is now that the performance of your daily programming activities does not give you room to learn by making mistakes. It’s as if you’re always on stage. The solution offered is to take the time to practice your craft without interruptions, in an environment where you can feel comfortable making mistakes.

Practice is important because it will get you to where you need to be. We talked about reading and going back to the classics as a way of getting you to master your craft but reading without practicing the acquired knowledge won’t really help. That’s why we believe efficient and deliberate practice methods not only help you learn faster but also help keep you motivated. Over time, this chain of exercises would hone your strengths and correct your weaknesses.

The book emphasizes that short feedback loops need to be incorporated into your practice sessions. While practice is good in theory, if you’re not getting periodic feedback, you’re probably developing bad habits. Over time, the need for constant feedback lessens as you grow as a craftsman, and is gradually replaced by your duty to take on the role of a senior apprentice, modeling good habits by practicing with less experienced developers.

I was very surprised by the following sentence: “Your grandmother may have told you that practice makes perfect. She was wrong. In fact, practice makes permanent. So be careful what you practice, and constantly evaluate it to ensure you haven’t gone stale. Choosing the right thing to practice every day is a skill almost as important as the act of repeated practice.”

The lines above shows that we could easily get comfortable and stop making concrete progress. Practicing is good but it has to be diverse to allow the growth to happen. The point is not to hone your memory, but to discover the nuances in even the simplest skilled activity. An easy to implement it could be as simple as finding an exercise in one of your old books and tweak it a little bit to make sure that it’s just a little harder than one you know you can easily solve.

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

The context of this pattern is that you are being enthusiastic about your passion to the points where it has open doors for you. The problem is such that there seems to be an endless stream of deeper and more fundamental concepts that are eluding you, despite the proficiency that you already have. The solution offered is to focus the thirst for learning on consuming as much of the written word as possible. Emphasize books over blogs as you construct your reading list.

The book emphasizes that reading the occasional research paper will stretch your mind and keep you in touch with the cutting edge of computer science, and also offers a source of challenging new ideas. Trying to implement these ideas will expand your toolbox with new algorithms, data structures, and design patterns many years before they reach the mainstream. An Important fact to remember is that Successful apprentices tend to focus on “long-lived books” and use the Web or experimentation to learn how the information has evolved and that’s why we should focus on going back to the classics. That being said, one danger of focusing on the classics is taking it too far and abandoning the more pragmatic knowledge and information that enables you to improve your day-to-day craftsmanship. Be sure to intermingle classics with modern, pragmatic books and/or articles in your reading list.

I really resonated with this because reading books hasn’t always been fun for me. Thankfully, the eBook and audio version of things have made it easier. I also like that they ended the pattern by the following: First, the trick is to keep up the momentum. After you’ve finished this book, decide now what your next book will be and make sure to buy or borrow it so that when you finish this book, you can switch immediately to the next one. Second, you should also try to keep a slim book with you at all times. This will let you use the little bits of dead time throughout each day (such as train journeys or waiting in queues) to learn. Third, Find the oldest book in your developer’s book collection and read that one first.

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

Breakable Toys

Success is often a tool used to measure how effective you are as a programmer, but this isn’t quite true. Failure is often referred to as the great teacher, as learning from mistakes that you make is great for improving yourself. The idea behind this is that if everything you make is bound to succeed every time then the process behind it might not haven hard. Things that don’t challenge you are not going to fail for you, but at the same time you are not going to learn anything from it.

This pattern is to take something, try to build it, and learn from your failure. You can be skilled and incredibly proficient in your strong suits but if you are not failing as you proceed you might not be challenging yourself. You might stagnate in your skill, and while you can be incredibly good at it, you still are not learning anything that is challenging you.

This particular pattern I agree with. Learning through adversity is often a great motivator. For some, time is an incredible motivator and through procrastination you have a literal time limit challenging you. For some, something new is an incredible motivator as it’s something utterly foreign and waiting to be explored. You should try something new to learn how your own skills are developing. Failure at first can deter you but taking this approach will teach you how failure will motivate you. You couldn’t succeed, but it doesn’t mean you cannot. You’ll find yourself thinking endlessly on that failure and seeing how others have succeeded where you failed will motivate you to think it has to be done. After all someone else has done it or likely created something like it. Take on a new library, build something that you never have before and let it break apart in your hands. Take the pieces and try building it again. In a sense you are letting yourself be broken by your broken project. Just challenging yourself will not be enough you have to learn from failure and learn how to fail. This pattern honestly should be called Breakable Self, as the learning portion isn’t the failed build, but rather using that failure to break a common mindset to succeed where you once failed.

From the blog CS@Worcester – A Boolean Not An Or by Julion DeVincentis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

“Learning How You Fail” is all about realizing that you’ve grown in mastery but at the same time remain stagnant in other areas. Rather than trying to overcompensate for shortcomings, taking the same effort and seeking introspection instead seems to be more worthwhile. When I think about it that way it makes sense, although breaking out of the habits I’ve already formed will prove to be difficult.

I do agree with the sentiment of this pattern, but the thought of someone’s natural ability to either be great at something or bad at something comes to mind. Is it worth the energy to be less bad at a certain thing when you can excel elsewhere? At the end of the day, I guess that answer varies from person to person. But there is something admirable to say about someone who you’ve watched improve at something they were originally horrible at.

The “Learn How You Fail” pattern seems to be a preemptive strike of some sort. Figuring out how you will fail doing something allows you to do your best to steer clear of the pitfalls that lead you to your failure. Throughout my life, I have been one to make the same mistakes repeatedly. I’ve always said that I’m just persistent, and I am. But I would probably gain a lot more from my persistence if chose to analyze what had gone wrong, rather than to try and brute force my way through certain things.

The scenario painted in this pattern is to write some code that performs a binary search in a simple text editor and continue to fix the code until we believe it’s perfect. Once the code has reached our level of satisfaction, we also write test code from scratch. I think the point of this exercise is to realize that we ourselves may not be as perfect as we think we are. While I feel like this pattern can be applied to software apprenticeship, I feel like it’s more suitable “life advice”. Perhaps I’m not opening my mind enough and that’s a failure I could learn to learn more about.

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.

During the job interview that I have had. There is one question that I ask most recruiters which I believe is essential for job seekers who are looking for their first job. Deciding whether to work at that company, the question about the culture of a company is important. I think that if a company with a toxic culture and working environment, it would discourage the employees. There is this saying by Paul Graham “Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems”. In this “Kindred Spirits”, the author thinks that organizations’ cultures that encourage software craftsmanship are rare which I also think is true. Every day, tech workers complain about the working culture in big tech, that it’s not how they think it was when they first applied for the jobs, and that their jobs demand more time than just 9 to 5. So, I think that having a good culture is not only good for employees but also makes sure having better productivity.
The solution for those people who work in toxic culture is to be in frequent contact with people who are walking a similar road. Therefore, we should be able to seek out people like ourselves who are also looking to excel. The long road is not a road that anyone walks alone and especially in our early career, we should have a mentor. On the other hand, the culture encourages a safe environment for exploration and learning, a culture that does not limit its employees in what they should learn and that they can feel free to show each other what they’re learning to tend to attract more talents. Having no obligation to follow others’ lead would interest workers to explore and not be afraid of risk-taking. However, despite the benefits of a community of like-minded folk, we should be aware of groupthink. Avoid the questions that shock our community. Try to be respectful and use intellectual thinking to keep the community healthy. The culture and the community around us can be measured in the way it reacts to new ideas. Whether it embrace the idea after the intensive debate and experimentation? Or the ideas are quickly rejected? The most value we can provide service is defending it against those who believe that marching in lockstep is the price of membership.
To be able to do so we need to join the community where the people we work with, the blog we read, and the ideas we are intrigued by are respected. We can create our community but don’t be too strict on the ideas and topics too early. Advertise anywhere that software developers in our area might see it. Over time, these would pay off, as the group becomes larger and energetic enough, it will sustain itself even when we are not there. That’s when we have a community, good culture, and a non-toxic environment.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Hung Nguyen by hpnguyen27 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.