The white belt apprentice pattern refers to the part of the movie where the main character thinks they know it all, but instead suffer tragically in some way due to their ignorance. This pattern recognizes that now that you have some skills, the real journey begins.

Assumptions can sometimes be dangerous and can impede your learning. Many times, when I’m trying to learn something, I associate with how it can be like doing something else. While this can be helpful to get me to remember how to do something, this method can also leave out the realization of other possibilities that a certain strategy offers. For example, throughout experimentation with different ingredients and brewing strategies, today many different brews of beer exist. This wouldn’t be possible if these craftsmen didn’t take the time to forget what they knew about making beer already, otherwise they would have just crafted the same one beer repeatedly.

While I find the information in the pattern interesting, I really wonder if I can apply it in my own endeavors in programming. I become doubtful I guess because this is a new way of thinking about how to learn for me. However, I feel like the explanation of learning your second language is put perfectly in the book. The need to feel productive is a dominant urge that I have, but that need must be sacrificed sometimes to learn something new and improve upon my skills. In fact, the book says that this is the most productive way of doing this so in turn, I guess nothing is really being lost.

Becoming comfortable with not being great at something after being great at it for the sake of learning is something I need to get better at. Learning how to do things with my left hand will be helpful if I cannot do things with my right hand, although it would feel naturally uncomfortable to do so. While I am open to and applaud the idea of this pattern, I can see myself struggling to apply it in my own life.

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.

Learn How You Fail

This Apprenticeship Pattern covers learning how to fail, and more importantly how to recover from failing. It makes the point that failure is necessary to learn a new skill, and if you’re never failing then you’re likely not trying new things and not expanding your knowledge. Failure is a normal and natural part of learning something new, and it’s just as much a part of the process as anything else. If you want to learn a new skill, you can’t be afraid of failure, and you have to accept that it will happen at some point. By trying to avoid failure, you’re actively hindering your learning and limiting your potential skill.

The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes the point that learning how you fail helps with self-assessment. Through failure, you can learn more about yourself, such as what things you have more difficulty with, and what things you can pick up relatively easily. If you don’t try to push yourself to failure then you’ll never discover your limits, and you won’t know how efficiently and effectively you could be working. Failure also forces you to admit your weaknesses, and to learn not to waste time with things that are outside of your skillset, and instead spend your time doing things that you know you can do correctly.

The Apprenticeship Pattern also makes a point about not getting down on yourself about your failures. By changing your mindset from failure being a bad thing to failure being a valuable experience for learning, you will become more productive overall and more capable of learning new skills. If every time you experience failure you get down on yourself and become afraid of failure to avoid the experience, then you’ll become much less productive, much less capable of learning new skills, and much less experienced overall. The correct way to minimize failures and maximize potential is not to avoid it altogether, but instead to take it on your stride and learn from it so that the situation in which the failure would occur wouldn’t ever happen again, rather than avoiding the failure itself. Only in this way would you be able to become a proficient software craftsman, because that requires learning many new skills, and has the potential for many pitfalls and failings that you must learn from.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Blog by anelson42 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This apprenticeship pattern encourages apprentices to record what they are learning, in either a public or private place (or both). Either in a blog or wiki or even just a personal journal. Each has its pros and cons, but in each instance, they allow you to look back and reflect on what you have learned, what you were having trouble with and can give you a map of where you have come from.

While I was reading this pattern, I couldn’t help but think of this blog itself. While at the beginning I thought of this as something I would only ever use for class, I can see myself updating it in the future to be a far more professional blog space where I can record my experiences in my professional career. Even in the past year, I have found myself checking old blog posts about other patterns I read about to form connections between them. Like the Breakable Toy pattern, where I talked about starting a wiki being a good idea. That feeds right back into this pattern, already showing its effectiveness as a tool.

I never really thought about writing being a part of this field, but as someone with an innate interest in writing, and who has gone so far as to minor in it, I am really excited to see that this is a larger part of the lifestyle of other software developers. I hope to be able to continue writing, either professionally or as just a part of my own journey to mastery of the craft. It is something that has always been a big part of my life and being able to do it in conjunction with software development is really important to me. I think that this is as good an outlet as any for that seemingly unrelated skillset.

I don’t think I disagree with any part of this pattern really. I guess if I had to pick something it would be uploading it for everyone, but even then I think that way of doing it has some value, I just think you should have something private as well. Overall, it’s a fairly straightforward pattern and aligns with what I enjoy doing anyway. I’ve been looking into using Obsidion as a wiki-creation software, and I think that it has potential for this sort of activity. Clearly, this is a fairly common practice within the industry and I hope I will be able to find the motivation to keep up with it as my career goes on.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kurt Maiser's Coding Blog by kmaiser and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Summary:

This apprenticeship pattern deals with a software developer that cannot afford to learn by failure. This software developer may work at a company that must get things correct, and thus cannot experiment and learn from his mistakes. Thus, this pattern recommends the developer to create his version of his work’s program in private, to experiment so he can learn.

I want to say off the bat that I do not disagree with anything stated in this pattern. In fact, the most I’ve learned has been from practicing and failing repeatedly, so I strongly believe that this is a very important pattern for all developers.

This pattern has helped me greatly in my understanding of development. For example, in one of my homework assignments that required me to implement an algorithm that sorts operating system “jobs” by time to process, I wanted to use what is called a “MultiMap”, that is to say, a Hash Map that allows duplicate keys that could then be sorted, by key or by value. After this assignment, I spent hours trying to figure out its implementation, and I eventually figured it out. By following this pattern, I was able to figure out more about Java types, and I taught myself how to use hashing algorithms. 

I find this apprenticeship pattern very interesting. I bring the above example up because what I find interesting about this apprenticeship pattern is that I never thought to apply it to my work projects. There is a lot of information that I’m learning about when I’m working outside of school, and this pattern has indeed changed the way I think about how I will work and what my profession will steer me towards, and vice versa. 

I will try to create a private project with homework or work in which I implement the project differently, and try to see if I come up with any valuable results. There are many things I’ve learned from applying this principle to a few homework assignments or free time projects, but I can feel that this would be very beneficial in trying this with new systems, or alternate pre-existing ones from school or work.

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