Skip to main content

Apprenticeship Pattern "Diving Deep"


This series explores Apprenticeship Patterns by Adewale Oshineye and Dave Hoover. This week, I decided to read the apprenticeship pattern “The Deep End.” 

To be completely honest, most career opportunities that are on the horizon are somewhat intimidating. I wonder if I have the ability to do a lot of the work they require. The chapter talks about getting into a rut, but my rut is working fast food. Making a transition to a career-oriented position is a big step, and it is a bit out of my comfort zone.

Instead of reluctantly accepting a task that I am not confident about, I should have the self-assurance to jump in at the deep end. This gives me permission to take on a task that might seem daunting when it presents itself. This is easier said than done, and I find it hard to entirely  abandon my initial timidness.

It is important to note that they also warn about getting too far out of your depth. It is okay to jump in the deep end, but “you still need to remember that if the water level is above your head it means you’re drowning.” This is key. They offer two other patterns for helping with this, which is “Finding Mentors” and “Kindred Spirits.” The titles seem descriptive enough to give a general sense of what you might need to look for. Perhaps one of these will be the topic of a future blog post to dive in more in depth.

The action it suggests is to measure the biggest projects I’ve accomplished based on a few factors of complexity. When the next project comes along, see how it compares. It claims this is a good indicator of where my career is heading, and it might be the basis of choices I make.

Already, when thinking of mapping my projects like this, I think to myself, “I need to do more independent projects.” I’ve done quite a bit for school, but I haven’t done anything incredibly ambitious on my own. I have vague goals of what I want to do, but I have done few concrete steps to fulfill them.

Most of my goals for independent projects are somewhat formidable at this point in the game. For example, I would like to make some sort of a web app that I would have to develop full stack. I have a few ideas in mind for what to do.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sprint 5 Retrospective (Capstone)

It is a shame that we are so close to the end of the semester. We were gaining so much momentum. It took us a while for us to get off the ground, but once we did, we never stopped gaining speed. I feel we will be able to keep this up through this last sprint. My hopes at the beginning of the semester for what we could accomplish were unrealistically high, but I am not disappointed with what we accomplished. We have not completed a full working component quite yet, but we are very close. I think our efforts are best spent finishing the one we are currently working on and doing it right. If we divided our efforts into starting something new, we run the risk of not fully completing anything. In the sage words of Ron Swanson, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” If we are able to get the tabs working beautifully, I will be happy with our effort. I have felt that our group has done a phenomenal job this sprint and every sprint before with our communication. We have a few ...

Testing: Like Destroying Sandcastles

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

Apprenticeship Pattern “Practice, Practice, Practice”

The apprenticeship pattern framed the problem is that if you do not have room to make mistakes in your day to day programming, you will not have room to grow. The next line hit close to home, “It’s as if you’re always on stage.” I learn quite a bit from my school assignments, but I don’t always think I have mastered each area before moving on to the next topic. The problem arises when I know my code could be improved upon, but it’s currently working. I don’t want to restructure my code too much, because I’m afraid of making it worse. The term comes to mind, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” I have problems with this way of thinking, but when you’re pressed to make something work before the impending deadline, “good enough” is sometimes feels like the only option I have left. This pattern champions a different approach to this kind of mentality. I like the idealized version that they have laid out based on the research of K. Anders Ericsson. This describes where a mentor would ass...