Apprenticeship Patterns Blog 1

The Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye is such an interesting book and hopefully a must read for aspiring software engineers, designers, developers or even hobbyists. From computing ethics, I learned that scientists are morally responsible for ensuring that the technology created or software released is aimed at improving the quality of life of humanity rather than destroying it. Creating high quality software not only benefits the current users and developers but also future developers who might need to replace, maintain and build more features. The book teaches the importance of having a growth mindset that comes from dedication and hard work.

 

From chapter one, Dave’s self-taught struggles stood out to me. He wanted to learn Perl at age 12 and later Java at 25 and almost gave up until when he was 26 and found mentors Edventions LLC in Skokie, Illinois at the height of the dotcom bubble. I can relate to this as I’ve taught myself some programming languages through youtube videos. Programming Channels such as FreeCodeCamp.org provide multi-hour video content free of charge and teach high quality materials. It's easy to give up especially when motivation starts to fade out. I've been in similar situations when I learning flask, a light-weight web application development environment using Python.

 

Moving on, I’ll quote from the book, “If you come to me with a cup that is already full, how can you expect me to give you something to drink?” this was the Zen master’s reply to the young philosopher who couldn’t shut up during their conversation. The authors teach that we must be open to learning new programming languages to which I agree and not simply sticking to those we already know or simply thinking in the patterns that we’re comfortable with. Though this is a somewhat painful experience, it’s fulfilling to reach that point where you build something that you can show off because of hard work. When I look at current job descriptions for example, I see most requiring Java or C++ programming skills which means I must be ready and willing to take on the path described by that company as a software developer rather than me dictating what platforms I prefer to work with.

 

I’ll touch on the pattern of constructing your curriculum which emphasizes that concepts or programming languages should not only be learned at surface level but rather on a deeper level. This helps to save time such that the programmer is not reinventing the wheel or working towards an idea that has been deemed academically impossible and instead must refine the problem to make it soluble. Personally, I can relate to this when it comes down to JavaScript where I’ve learned some concepts and can come up with interesting solutions, but deep down I believe there’s always another leaner, faster method to produce the same or better results.

Thea's Food Pantry and LibreFoodPantry

 It's such a great opportunity contributing to a meaningful project like Thea's Food Pantry, an open source program dedicated to Worcester State University students who might find themselves in need of food supplies. The program was established so that students can focus more on their learning rather than worrying about going without food. Food insecurity is a reality that affects a third of Massachusetts college students due to various factors such as hikes due to inflation and heavy financial burdens for instance paying student loans.
LibreFoodPanty is the opensource infrastructure on which Thea's Food Pantry operates. It's a template roadmap of principles that we'll be using to build and connect features on Thea's Food Pantry. Going through the docs, LibreFoodPantry (LFP) had an interesting user story map in picture format that shows different roles and responsibilities of users which I found to be interesting. Some of the roles include administration, staff, guest and donor. It's always a good thing to have visual like this before writing any line of code as it creates clarity of what needs to be done.
Thea's Food Pantry also has user stories but in a textual format that shows how the intended users of the software currently work and the guide to the design of the software. They have the same user roles as shown in LPF but detailed such as displaying a blank page when a new guest access the system.
Overall, the two systems are a solid foundation for practicing how to write opensource software products.