I borrowed Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman from my friend and mentor at work. I felt like it was reaching out to me to read it. Maybe that’s because I’m the first person I’ve known with Apprentice in her job title. Maybe it is because the description of a software craftsperson’s learning path draws so heavily from the Japanese zen way of learning that I find very appealing. Maybe because the book is pretty short. Probably for all three reasons at once, I found myself once again pulling more meta-learning knowledge into my head, and hopefully the reading will help me keep becoming a better Software Engineer Apprentice and All-Around Swell Human Being.
I was in for a surprise, though, when I dove in and found the very words of my teachers at Dev Bootcamp leaping back at me. Sherif’s adage, “Expose your ignorance!” runs as a refrain through the first few chapters. It’s a good reminder, since I still struggle with the temptation to learn in secret until I appear competent. A temptation that is obviously folly, because the only thing I really have to brag about and stand out from other software engineers is my hunger to learn and ability to ask the beginner questions that experienced developers have forgotten about.
Apprenticeship Patterns reminded me of the urgency around my apprenticely ability to ask unique questions. After all, I will not be a beginner forever. Now I am more concerned than ever about gathering my courage and exposing my ignorance. The more, the earlier, the better. But it is still hard to interrupt people and look foolish. And if I wait till I get stuck, my question usually degrades down to a detail I simply forgot, rather than the core concept that started me on the path of stuckness, in the first place.
Other DBC teachers’ choruses jump out of Apprenticeship Patterns' pages as well. Steven's warning that there will always be many new technologies to learn, but the deeper art of craftsperson practice and wisdom should be our true goal, was the central point of chapter three. It was nice to read it because my vivid image of Steven (so vivid because at one point his tirades about all the zillions of things we had to learn in only a few days, scared me so much I burst into tears, and was forever slightly afraid of him) leapt out of the innocuous formula of the book chapter to bring the message to life again.
I'm nearing the end of Apprenticeship Patterns, now, and many of the chapters have brought be back to DBC, and forward to thinking about my immediate future at Omada. Fortunately, I have a lot of tangible takeaways to keep me motivated after I finish reading. For instance:
connect with authors and contributors whose work I value, look up the CVs of people I admire to see what skills they have that I might want to learn in order to be more like them,
test-drive to quickly figure out what's broken, etc.
The biggest takeaway though, is the feeling that there are respected authors in the industry who see a problem with the often-bemoaned lack of skilled software developers (and surplus of unskilled devs) and say the cure is to cultivate and keep new talent. Like my other favorite meta-learning book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt, Apprenticeship Patterns' Dave Hoover and Ade Oshineye see the problem in letting software talent fly away into management and other non-software-building roles, just because that's where the promotions are. Their plea to eschew your promotion in favor of learning for learning's sake is kind of a tall order, but the idea of negotiating to create a role where you can still do what you love, become a master at it, and move up the career-title-food-chain at the same time was very lovely. I kind of have that right now with my Software Engineer Apprentice title, which is a new role that the company has to figure out at the same time that I do.
Books like that welcome apprentices into the industry, and then hand them a cornucopia of things to do for the next several years to start becoming skilled. The way of becoming a skilled master of coding is not to hack up the next trendy convenience app as quickly as possible and then consider yourself accomplished. Like anything worth doing, it's a long road of practice and mistakes. The only way to improve is to try different and better stuff and keep trying.
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
janainaart
origamiaround
stormborns
