Kevin P. Taylor

"Self-Education and the Craftsman" SCNA Presentation

My favorite conference of the year was, not surprisingly, this summer's Software Craftsmanship North America, which was co-organized by Obtiva.

The presentations were challenging, diverse, and at times, uncomfortable. Because of several of those presentations, I've since had opportunities to question my own closely-held beliefs about our profession and my career as a professional programmer.

The presentation that had the biggest impact on me personally was Michael Feathers' "Self-Education and the Craftsman." (See the whole presentation.) Maybe this is because I am largely a self-educated programmer myself. And, many of the best hackers I've worked with have been self-educated. (That is an interesting phenomenon in our industry, which I'll save for a future post.)

Instead of a list of flavor-of-the-day APIs, frameworks, and languages, Feathers gave us a laundry list of important programming language topics that are widely-unknown or misunderstood among otherwise well-heeled programmers. These are topics that separate the master from the journeyman.

(Of course, it takes more than knowledge to achieve mastery. As George Leonard explains in Mastery, "to achieve mastery, you must practice a new skill patiently, diligently, and consistently."

Language Topics

In Feathers' talk, there was hardly a mention of Ruby on Rails or Spring 2.x or the JVM. Instead, he gave us this list of topics to wrestle with:

• Big-O, Little-O, Theta Notation,
• Covariance and contravariance,
• Types,
• Objects are closures,
• State machines,
• Regular expressions and automata,
• Turing machines,
• Halting problem,
• Worse is better,
• Redundancy is not a strength: How to make logic stronger,
• Security on Sand: "On Trusting Trust"
• Location transparency is a myth,
• Objects are clay.

Book Recommendations

In addition to the above list of topics to review or introduced myself to, as the case may be, Feathers gave us this list of must-read books:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson and Sussman
• Designing Object Systems, by Cook and Daniels
• Graphs: Theory and Algorithms, by Thulasiraman and Swamy
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, by Aho
• Discrete Mathematics with Combinatorics, by Anderson
• Introduction to the Theory of Computation, by Sipser

SICP Study Groups

Another of the outcomes of the Feathers presentation was the formation of several SICP study groups, based on his recommendation of the book.

Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools study group, anyone?

SICP Study Groups

One of my favorite outcomes from this summer's Software Craftsmanship North America conference, which Obtiva co-organized, is the SICP study groups. SICP refers to the MIT computer science textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which is one of the most lucid, and challenging, foundational texts on the subject of computer programming languages.

The reason I am so inspired by the SICP study group phenomenon is that it highlights what I love most about programmers, and more specifically, software craftsmen. Even before we used that label, passionate hackers have been forming user groups, book clubs, IRC channels, and mailing lists, to gather, discuss, and challenge each other's ideas. And, through that, refine their own.

SICP itself is a walk through the esoteric Lisp dialect called Scheme. While on that walk, readers learn about abstractions, objects, closures, recursion, meta-programming, logic programming, and interpreters and compilers.

In fact, there are no mentions of any of the exciting new technologies, frameworks, or languages that will help land a gig. Nothing learned in the book will immediately increase the value of a resume or cause said resume to trigger a recruiter's keyword search on Dice.

So, why are dozens of experienced programmers, many of them the alpha-geeks on their teams, spending their time working through this difficult textbook together? They want to understand. The fundamentals. The whys. The history. The art. The craft. They want to understand the field.

The best professional basketball players on a team are also the last to leave the court after practice has ended. They continue to practice their free throw, their lay up, and their jump shot, long after teammates have showered and left the building.

We are practicing our jump shots.