Apprenticeship Pattern: Record What You Learn
The pattern I decided to read is titled “Record What You Learn” from chapter 5 of Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. This pattern starts out by giving context of a situation I know I have found myself in multiple times. This situation is one where I am relearning the same technical lessons over and over again. The proposed solution to this problem is to keep a chronological record of the lessons I’ve learned. This record can be made in the format of a blog or wiki, to name a few options. Additionally, these kinds of records can be made public or private. Public records are good for building connections since others can read them and private records are good for being painfully honest with yourself about your progress. The last section of the solution ends on discussing how your record keeping tool can be an example of a Breakable Toy and how this Breakable Toy can help you extract lessons from it as one grows from a novice to a more experienced developer. The actionable item this excerpt ends with is encouraging its readers to start immediately because these entries can become the basis for books, magazines, and blog posts in the future.
In response to the question, “Will this pattern cause you to change the way you will work?”, my answer is a resounding yes. I’ve read this pattern multiple times before writing this blog post and have slowly been successfully developing my own personal journal/“Breakable toy”. I think one of the reasons why this has been so effective for me has to do with the following line I found interesting while reading this pattern, “The private record allows you to be painfully honest with yourself about the progress you are making”. In my journal, I get to reflect on how well I truly know certain technologies and what I still want to learn. And whenever I learn something new, I write about it in a way that is meaningful to me (as opposed to doing work for a class deadline). Therefore, I completely agree with the information in this pattern. It has been a super beneficial process for me so far and it is rewarding to physically see the evidence of what I've been learning in one localized place. I’m happy that if I have taken anything from this book, it is a journal/“Breakable Toy” I can continue using in my career and life.
