The book, Apprenticeship Patterns(1), seeks to share hard-earned insights to new software developers, like myself, to be the best developers, and people, that they can be.
The story about the overflowing tea cup felt familiar. I find myself having to be a fountain of knowledge and solutions for my coworkers, trying to know everything for them, and I’ve found my cup full when it’s time to work alongside my university team, or learn from my professor. It’s made me fail to actively learn in some situations as a result, and what’s the point of that?
I need to be able to “empty the teacup”, as it were, so I can continue the knowledge struggle alongside my software peers, as they know many things I do not. Humility is necessary for perpetual learning.
Honestly, a book like this couldn’t come at a better time for me. I’m in the middle of something remarkably similar to this paragraph from the book:
“Most people won’t have an opportunity to work in a formal apprenticeship where they are being mentored by software craftsmen. In reality, most people have to claw and scratch their
apprenticeships out of less-than-ideal situations. They might be facing overbearing and/or incompetent managers, de-motivated coworkers, impossible deadlines, and work
environments that treat novice developers like workhorses, storing them in small, rectangular stalls with a PC and a crippled Internet connection.”
It’s challenging to navigate a situation that ticks most of those boxes, and then handle the switch back into school projects. It’s a nosedive from one world into another, learning alongside completely different groups of people, different technical capabilities, ages, careers, states, countries, goodness me!
Ever the key though, Apprenticeship Patterns constantly promotes perpetual learning throughout any challenge we face. That concept lies at the heart of making software, and is one of the reasons I love making all these code toys. There is essentially never an end to what we can and will do:
Today, it’s “bigger!”
Tomorrow, “smaller”,
Next, “faster!”,
Then, “brighter?”,
“safer!”,
“riskier!”
aaaaaand….
“I keep accidentally hitting the cancel button, can I have a confirm cancel pop-up?”
“My internet was laggy so I hit the button twice and two orders went through…”
oh no :)))))))))))
It’s almost a miracle to have a book like this attempting to quantify the peculiarly-individual-yet-group-based skill transfer of software apprentices. The perpetual education, the spending hours trading methods, processes, design choices, it’s truly a uniquely familiar situation we’ve found ourselves in as software people, and it really makes it clear to me that I need to keep looking for more knowledge and skills in every corner I can find them.
An obsession with “figuring it out” is right!
Time to reintroduce humility,
and a little bit of “Being the Worst” again.
Somehow, I breathe a sigh of relief over that.
Sources:
(1) Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye
KeepOnComputing 
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