Sam Bryan

The apprenticeship pattern I decided to choose for this week’s blog was “Read Constantly.” It was somewhat self-explanatory, but I thought it had some good insights nonetheless. It recommended reading books over blogs. I would imagine that this is the right course of action from researching blogs last semester. All the material was good and informative, but many times when the host was interviewing someone, it felt like a summary of what could be a very interesting book. There’s only so much that can be gained from a blog post or a podcast. The things that you learn from those can be valuable, but it is better to go deeper when possible. Even if you have a very wide base of knowledge, it will only get you so far when you only scratch the surface. The quote at the very beginning, from Steve McConnell, says that if you read a good programming book every other month, you will distinguish yourself from your peers. This seems like a worthwhile task, and frankly it is very doable. He cha...

Up until this point, it has felt like we have mostly been trying to simply get our project to run. I am not sure if the other teammates have felt this way, but I am anxious to contribute. It would be nice to have something to show for our efforts. It has been slightly frustrating, but I should have expected this slight speed bump. In light of this, I have not been able to do some of the less important tasks that I wanted to get done. I wanted to research about testing in angular. In addition, I have been wanting to complete a tutorial to refresh my knowledge on Angular. I feel that this is one area that I would really like to round out my knowledge on because I feel it is somewhat lacking. The bright side is that I was able to get my code to build and run without as much trouble that many of my teammates and other teams have experienced. Also, by the end of yesterday (2/19/19), with some input from me and some of the other teams, it looked like all of us got it to build and run. ...

For this blog post, I will be discussing the Apprentice Pattern, Expose Your Ignorance, found in the text Apprenticeship Patterns . This pattern piqued my interest. It discussed how to deal with inevitably not knowing something. It is comforting to hear that I am not the only one who sometimes feels out of their depth. This pattern gave me a few things to work on. It can feel natural to tell people what they want to hear, but that isn't a good way to build trust. I know it may seem obvious, but it is very easy to fall into that trap, and I know from experience. I like the idea of building a reputation on my ability to learn rather than what I say I know. Ignorance isn’t something to hide — it is a chance to grow. This brings to mind a “growth mindset,” which means that instead of seeing challenges as something that sets one back is instead something that can be learned from and used as fuel to grow. It is clear that this book adopts this idea, even if it isn’t necessarily one o...

In this post, I will be commenting on the New Yorker article “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers” by Atul Gawande, from November 12, 2018. It focused on doctor’s frustrations with the transition to Electronic Medical Records, or EMRs. Learning about this it has been surprising how painful the transition process has been. I have heard similar complaints from friends in the field, but I did not know how widespread it was. By the sound of it, it is hundreds of little reasons that make the doctors’ lives harder. For one, it is much harder to add a simple note to a patients’ file. There is a lot of unnecessary information  that needs to be filled out, and many of these fields are mandatory. Another reason is that the computer gives the doctor arbitrary limits, like they cannot view lab results from a week before because their window for viewing it has expired. Yet another reason is that the user interface is not very user friendly. It takes several more clicks than it should to do a...