Last Monday I once again attended the Software Craftsmanship Group meeting where a panel was held on the topic of Apprenticeship. I was expecting to see a discussion about what constitutes apprenticeship and the master-apprentice relationship. Instead, the conversation was mostly around two examples of companies that have apprenticeship programs.

Dave Hoover from Obtiva and Paul Pagel from 8th Light contrasted their approaches. Uncle Bob posted his impressions about the two programs and his own experiences of carrying an apprentice program, so I won't bother you with a similar (but less qualified) report.

I did bring back a few conclusions and questions, though:

• It's hard to convince someone to take a job as an apprentice when higher-paying (or better titled) jobs are available.
• Someone that is willing to take such position will inevitably be passionate for the craft and hungry for knowledge. This eventually helps weeding out the inadequate candidates.
• Mentors need to keep up with the apprentices. Often they'll outgrow your ability to keep them busy and interested.
• It takes a lot of energy and investment from the company and mentor to properly guide an apprentice into the path to journeyman. When that apprentice leaves the company, I'm afraid the loss is too big and maybe there wasn't enough time to recoup that investment.
• Both cases presented had not experienced a failure yet, which is good, I guess. But it also leaves me wondering if it really works. Failures can assist validating the successes, the trick is always tweaking the process to keep the failure rate low (but zero is always suspicious.)
• It seems too easy to have an apprenticeship program deteriorate into just internship — with a fancy name.

I'll post an update with a link to the video of the meeting if that becomes available.

My Apprenticeship Process

Interestingly enough, I had a chance to join an apprenticeship program a long time ago, before I got into software development.

Between high school and college I started a 5-month internship as an Electronics Technician at a local TV station. The official title was intern but it was pretty obvious there was a lot more going on.

By that time I was in my teens, and very passionate about Electronics, probably just as much as I am now about software. At the TV station I had the honor of working with a true master of that profession. My mentor not only knew the ins and outs of professional audio and video equipment, but he also loved to talk about that and teach his hard-earned techniques to us. He was as highly regarded as any professional can be. Still, his purpose in life seemed to be that every technician was as good or better than him.

Even though I learned more in those 5 months than in my 5 years in college, after seeing my mentor at work I could never dare to say I was anything more than an apprentice. The impression that I carry with me to this day is that apprenticeship is a long process. Even if you get promoted after a while, it's hard to say you're no longer an apprentice. The lines between apprentice, journeyman, and master are indeed blurry.

Unfortunately, in my software career I have never had a chance to go through similar process. Instead, like most of us, I was simply thrown in the fire and fought my way out of it. I learned a lot in these situations, but I'm sure I also wasted a lot of time doing the wrong things until I figured out the right ones. A good mentor would have guided me to the right options without depriving me of the discovery and accomplishment sensations.

Hooray for masters and apprentices! Both with tiny egos and great passion. Both seeking continuous improvement.

After an unfortunate cancelation of our last meeting because of the weather, February's meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET Group should be a very interesting one.

Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin looks into XP's rearviewmirror, lessons learned, and the current status of Agile development.

XP: After 10 years, why are we still talking about it?

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It has been 10 years since Extreme Programming broke upon our industry. In that time we have seen the rise of the Agile movement, and the gold rush for Scrum certification. We have seen the concept of testing do a complete reversal in emphasis; and shift away from heavy planning. But what have we learned? Do we really all program in pairs? Do we really all write our tests first? Do Agile projects really fare better than others? Do we have enough data now to separate the truth from the myth? And why, after all this time, does it still dominate our conferences and conversations. Isn't there something new to talk about?

Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. In the last 35 years, he has worked in various capacities on literally hundreds of software projects. He has authored "landmark" books on Agile Programming, Extreme Programming, UML, Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ Programming. He has published dozens of articles in various trade journals. Today, He is one of the software industry's leading authorities on Agile software development and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine.

Mr. Martin is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated. Object Mentor is a sister company to Object Mentor International. Like OMI, Object Mentor is comprised of highly experienced software professionals who provide process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting , training, and development services to major corporations around the world.

7:45 pm

Let's use the discussion time to go over the group topics that were planned for last meeting, which had to be canceled.

• What worked well and what didn't in 2008
• What direction should we take with our group
• Viability of our group organizing a CodeCamp soon
• Global ALT.NET participation: as suggested in this message

If you want to help define our meetings format and group actions, then come and help us in this discussion.

Due to scheduling problems we had to delay this announcement more than we would like to. But we will still have our monthly meeting on Wednesday, January 14^th.

Planning for 2009

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
We had a guest speaker for this month's meeting but unfortunately we had to change plans at the last minute.

Instead of that we will use the opportunity to do some group housekeeping.

• What worked well and what didn't in 2008
• What direction should we take with our group
• Viability of our group organizing a CodeCamp soon
• Global ALT.NET participation: as suggested in this message

If you want to help define our meetings format and group actions, then come and help us in this discussion.

7:45 pm
We have skipped the open discussion portion of our meetings last couple of times. This time, after we cover the items in the agenda, let's make sure we reserve some time for this activity.

There's a chance we have someone from Red Point lead a discussion about Agile development.

We'll update this description if we receive confirmation or not of the Agile discussion.

Thanks to the brave souls that ignored the incredibly exaggerated Winter storm warnings and insane weather forecast for last night. These folks came to the LCNUG meeting and were home before the first snow flake hit the ground. Also, thanks LCNUG for inviting me to talk, I hope you enjoyed at least a little bit.

The material I had to show in my presentation would no doubt fill an entire day (because it came from a full-day class I previously led) but we are not that crazy so we decided that:

• Doesn't matter how much of the material we cover, what we cover we will cover well.
• It would be best to talk about less things but get more value out of that than talk about a whole lot of things and feel like you just wasted two hours of your life.
• Go only as far as our stamina (and storm anxiety) allowed us to.
• Ask, ask, ask. Don't go back home with any lingering question.
• Well, keep that under the 2-hour mark, will you?

I never thought we would have enough time to see the entire material or even see some jQuery stuff. But I'm confident that what we have seen there will allow anyone that is starting to take JavaScript seriously to jump on jQuery (or YUI or Prototype.js, etc) and be able to effectively read the docs, the samples, and even the source code.

I'm trying to get clearance with my company to share the presentation material. Either by a download link here or directly emailing the attendees. Sit tight.

Next week I'll be speaking at the Lake County .NET Users' Group, in Grayslake, IL. The topic will be something that is near and dear to me and which I have talked and written about quite a number of times.

If you live in the North 'burbs, come and support our local group. You can register for this event here.

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces

One of the greatest problems with JavaScript is its superficial syntax resemblance of C-style languages. We call it the curse of the curly braces.

That is also a very large source of frustration for developers trying to learn JavaScript beyond the basics. Thinking that JavaScript is somehow related to Java or even "It's almost like C# but a little simpler" is an unfortunate and common occurrence that can only lead to trouble.

In this session we will analyze some of the fundamental differences between JavaScript and C#/Java. We will highlight the pitfalls that can trap us and the appropriate workarounds for them.

Time permitting and if there's interest we will take a look at Idiomatic JavaScript, which will help us understand how JavaScript is being written these days. Learning about this will also help you when trying to read the source code or even the documentation and samples for popular JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, YUI, etc.