Sam Bryan

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...

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 ...

The long and short of the pattern is to not accept a lucrative position or promotion if it takes you away from practicing your technical skills. If those skills aren’t constantly honed, they will be lost or become outdated before long. A family friend was a midlevel manager at a software development company before he was laid off. He had gotten away from doing the technical work. The trouble was that most companies promote from within, so it was hard for him to apply for a job that he had before. It was also hard for him to start a job doing the technical side because those skills weren’t as fresh in his mind. There’s a good lesson to be learned from his story. I often hear from people complain their manager is out of touch. The pointy haired boss  from Dilbert strikes a chord for so many for a reason. Perhaps more fitting to this pattern is The Office’s (U.S.) Michael Scott. While he has his moments, he is by in large an extremely incompetent manager. However, he does go on so...

I once watched a video by a self-proclaimed “lifehack guru,” where he talked about what he claimed to be a revolutionary new way to “think stuff done.” I always take ideas like this with a grain of salt, but in this particular video, I thought there was something to the advice he gave. He said to look at your cluttered desk (or area of your choice) and to imagine it clean. The important part is this: you pause and take some satisfied breaths about how good it feels to have a clean desk. Note you have not done anything yet, but you feel the satisfaction of what it will feel like when you are done. Already, you should find that you have, without meaning to, probably thought of a few steps to achieving it. That’s a long way of getting around to introduce the pattern, “The Long Road,” but the action that it suggests feels very similar. It suggests to imagine your future ten years from now and further, even the most far fetched version, and use that thought experiment to help plan your ...

This sprint, in my mind, one of the most important things that I was able to figure out was getting connected to AMPATH team through the Zeplin app. It seems that someone, perhaps accidentally, disconnected me from the group. Once reconnected, I was able to connect the rest of my group. Although it hardly was a difficult task, it is hard to overstate how important it is to be on the same page as the team you are building the product for. It could have prevented a lot of wasted time on our end, and it makes it more likely that they get the end product they want. Probably the most important thing I did in terms of learning about the tools we will be using was creating a “spike.” It is a new term I’ve learned that I will add to my lexicon, meaning to build a prototype of a product, diving deep to learn as much as you can. I touched upon it in my last apprenticeship patterns blog post, on “breakable patterns.” I failed to make a successful working prototype that did everythin...

This week, I will be exploring another apprenticeship pattern, which is “Breakable Toys.” I briefly mentioned this pattern in my last post, and I thought it was worth revisiting. The professor of my capstone, Dr. Wurst, had suggested for us to try to create something, even if it wasn’t exactly what we were trying to do. This would allow us to dive deep into learning one thing. The term he used for what he was talking about was “spike,” which I isn’t exactly the same as this pattern, but it certainly is a similar idea. This pattern more pertains to doing projects on your own time to learn from your mistakes. In school, it wouldn’t make sense to turn in projects that don’t work. It would be hard to pass most classes if I did. In many cases, school or work, failure is not an option. Of course the authors don’t advocate experimenting with those projects. They would rather you learn independently so that you can apply the skills you pick up. For the past few blogs, I have talked abo...