Sun, 22 May 2005

Looking for The Quality Without a Name

I have experienced this self-sustaining wholeness when I have read The Right Book At The Right Time as a result of Constructing My Curriculum. This wholeness comes when the ideas in the book are directly relevant to what I am learning in practice, or when they tie together in theory what I have read in more practical books that vary across time and subject.

I have experienced this self-sustaining wholeness several times since leaving my previous employer. My Accurate Self-Assessment informed me that I was a novice, and yet it was becoming difficult to Ignore My Title because I had quickly surpassed my co-workers. As I sought to Be The Worst I found my way to ThoughtWorks. Being a ThoughtWorker has allowed me to apply more of these apprenticeship patterns than anywhere else.

And hooking together patterns is at the center of the Quality Without A Name...

"The quality without a name appears, not when an isolated pattern lives, but when an entire system of patterns, interdependent at many levels, is all stable and alive." p. 131

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Fri, 13 May 2005

The Ruby White Belt

Taking a cue from Jim Coplien's OrganizationBookPatternTable and corresponding OrgPatternsMap, I started a page on my private wiki that mapped some of the dependencies for Accurate Self-Assessment. I then began developing a Ruby script to grab my wiki page, parse it, and convert the patterns into dot format, which I would then pipe into dot to create something like this

And it was all going very smoothly until I needed to use a regular expression to grab all the instances of a specific regexen from a single line. In Perl this is accomplished like this:

	$line = 'Mac Mini, 1.25GHz $499.00 1.42GHz $599.00';
	@prices = $line =~ /\$(\d+)/g;

	line = "Mac Mini, 1.25GHz $499.00 1.42GHz $599.00"
	prices = []
	line.gsub( /\$(\d+)/ ) do
		prices.push($1)
	end

And then I pondered an apprenticeship pattern that Ade drafted yesterday: Wear the White Belt. A key thought from the pattern:

"We have to be able to put aside our past experiences and preconceptions to allow in new knowledge."

	line = "Mac Mini, 1.25GHz $499.00 1.42GHz $599.00"
	prices = line.scan( /\$(\d+)/ )

Ahhhh, the power of Perl combined with the elegance of Japanese design. Hold onto that white belt.

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Mon, 09 May 2005

Initial List of Apprenticeship Patterns

Or to be more accurate, I wrote a Ruby script to scrape my personal wiki and post the patterns publicly. :-)

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The Power of Attentiveness

I asked Robert to pair with me when refactoring some tests a month or so ago despite being pretty nervous to do so. It turns out it was one of the best pairing experiences I have had. I did learn quite a bit technically, but on a people skills level I was totally astounded. Even though it did take a few days for my brain to realise what Robert had actually done or rather facilitated.

The funny thing is that I can not describe in particular what it is that Robert taught me. What I got from it was the desire to develop the soft skills which were demonstrated so naturally, perhaps without him even knowing it. He made me feel good about my programming even though my experience in comparison pales. For the first 15 minutes I was pretty terrified pairing with him. Consequently in those 15 minutes I was not really that effective.

It is not that he explicitly encouraged me, he listened to what I had to say. He re-evaluated the decisions he had made after hearing what I said. And the more I felt good about everything, the more I had to say and the more useful I was. He didn't let me get away with not knowing what was going on, as soon as he saw that the keyboard was passed over to me. If I didn't understand, it was because the code that we were writing was not self documenting. We renamed. We refactored. And I understood. Most importantly though, I really felt in tune with Robert and what we were doing. I was feeling good and having fun.

I have just re-read the above paragraph over again and I still don't think I've described what exactly I am trying to. Basically Robert's ability to pair with someone and really make them feel as though they are contributing, and always picking up on any subtle "broken connection" between the pair and not moving on until we were both again in step was phenomenal. I think that is probably the most productive (and mentally tiring) yet completely rewarding pairing that I've done. I think this ability holds just as much water as technical skill, in fact I think it holds more.

It was an awesome experience.

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Thu, 05 May 2005

Apprenticeship Pattern: Accurate Self-Assessment

"For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." --Luke 14:11

For the few fortunate developers that work under the formal supervision of master craftsmen, maintaining an Accurate Self-Assessment is as simple as sitting down periodically with their mentor and reviewing their progress. The rest of us must pull our mentoring out of books, blogs, online communities, local user groups, peers, and from project-to-project. Maintaining an Accurate Self-Assessment becomes a much more proactive and rigorous activity. Some of the patterns that facilitate this activity include Be the Worst, Expose your Ignorance, Find your Master, and Kindred Spirits.

Many apprentices find that as they walk the path toward journeyman they begin surpassing their more experienced cohorts. For some, they will eventually find themselves in leadership positions with impressive words in their titles such as architect, senior, and engineer. This phenomenon is a threat an Accurate Self-Assessment. Software craftsmen, particularly apprentices, must be careful who they compare themselves to: a craftsman's progress should be assessed relative to master craftsmen, not the industry average. The implications of this is that there are team leads, architects, and senior developers who still consider themselves apprentices. Maintaining an Accurate Self-Assessment allows apprentices to Ignore their Title and continue on The Long Road.

Humility is at the heart of apprenticeship, specifically this pattern. The early successes that many software developers experience can destroy the humble attitude that a successful apprenticeship requires. Jerry Weinberg describes the road to mastery as plateaus, ravines, and steep inclines. As the apprentice reaches new plateaus she must maintain her humility, it is far too easy to become impressed with our ever-growing abilities. From Becoming a Technical Leader...

"I can still remember how splendid it felt to be the best IBM 650 programmer in San Francisco, more than a quarter-century ago. This is the typical feeling in the middle of the plateau stage -- smug satisfaction." p. 42

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Buried in Apprentice Stories and Laughter

I'm up to my eyeballs in stories to harvest, but I thought I'd share one snippet from Matt Savage:

"I sometimes wonder if I'll ever stop laughing at code I produced 6 months ago."

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