Kevin P. Taylor

Agile 2010 Presentation: Programmer Self-Education

At the Agile 2010 Conference in Florida, I'm happy to be presenting a 30 minute experience report entitled, Programmer Self-Education: My Year Studying Programming Language Fundamentals on Tuesday at 11:30.

Official Session Description

After attending Michael Feathers's talk at SCNA 2009 titled "Self-Education and the Craftsman," Kevin Taylor made a commitment to himself to read the revered, and despised, MIT textbook, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP). Over the next year, he spent hours each week working through challenging programming exercises in Lisp. In this talk, Kevin shares some of the programming fundamentals he discovered, or rediscovered. Kevin also shares his insights on the importance of self-education (knowledge + practice) for software craftsmen and their journey toward mastery.

Additional Insights

This session is about programmer self-education first and the material contained within SICP, second. Unfortunately, after considering how much SICP material I should present, it became painfully obvious that I wouldn't be able to do justice to any topics from the book within 30 minutes.

Since many of us aspire to become masters of our craft, I am using this brief session to discuss:

1. How/why I chose to spend my time with SICP, a seemingly impractical book.
2. Brief highlights of material I discovered/rediscovered in the book.
3. My general approach to self-education, which is applicable to any topic worth aspiring to master.

Frankly, this experience report could be expanded into a whole day or semester of material, so be prepared for a whirlwind, if you attend.

EDIT 1/10/2012: Here is a link to the presentation (this one given a few weeks after the agile conference):

http://vimeo.com/14611112

Software Craftsmanship Spikes

Over the past year, we've had many people drop by the Obtiva software studio for short volunteer stints of codesmithing and geekfesting with us. The visits lasted for a few hours or a few days.

Some of the notable visitors (in no meaningful order):  J.B. Rainsberger, Amanda Laucher, Uncle Bob Martin, Corey Haines, Paul Pagel, Jim Suchy, Obie Fernandez, Jeff Patton, and Brian Marick. Thank you, all!

But, we also get a second type of visitor. These are folks who are not necessarily well known. They are apprentices and journeymen who are eager to come pair with passionate fellow craftsmen and share their knowledge with us. And hopefully after a few hours or days, they leave with new tools, techniques, and experiences to power their careers forward.

We've taken to calling this second type of visit a Software Craftsmanship Spike. Just as we do code spikes to gather more information before proceeding with a course of action, visiting craftsmen come here to gather more information about themselves and their careers. Information about technologies, about agile practices, about apprenticeship, about what it is like to work in a craftsmanship environment, or about what they want to do next in their career. 

For example, pair programming might sound cool but if you haven't done it full time for days or weeks, how do you really know you want to take that new gig where you'll be pairing full time?

Or, maybe you've been doing TDD for a year or two. But, you have lingering doubts about whether you are really enjoying the full benefits from it and you want to see how it is done by other practitioners.

In fact, we just had a Software Craftsmanship Spike take place last week.

Interested in participating in a Spike? Contact me. Or, leave a comment below and share your ideas on how this concept can be evolved to become more useful to the participants and more widespread in the craftsmanship community.

"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.

Definition of Hackerpreneur

Hackerpreneur

-noun

a leader who combines the skills and passions of a software hacker or craftsman, with the drive and passion of an entrepreneur, to successfully create and market new software products or services.

See also:

• Hacker: "a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." —Eric S. Raymond
• Software Craftsman: a software developer who ascribes to the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship.
• Entrepreneur: a person driven less by making money and more by a need to see her new product or service succeed in the marketplace.

Examples:

• Paul Graham: a programmer, entrepreneur, and writer. Paul is known for being an advocate of the Lisp programming language and for co-founding Viaweb, which eventually was purchased by Yahoo! and became Yahoo! Stores. He is also a co-founder of Y Combinator, which provides seed funding to hi-technology startups.
• Joel Spolsky: a software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer. Joel is the founder of Fog Creek Software.

Software Craftsmanship North America, August 26th, 2009

Software Craftsmanship North America is scheduled for August 26th, 2009. Conveniently, it will be held the same week as Agile 2009, also in Chicago. Even more conveniently, it will be held across the street from Agile 2009!

So, what is Software Craftsmanship and why am I linking a Software Craftsmanship conference to an Agile conference? I encourage you to visit the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto and the active Software Craftsmanship Google Group, to form your own opinions.

For me, Software Craftsmanship primarily represents two things: A school of thought within Agile that advocates the quality work and the collaboration that we see in developer-centric Extreme Programming teams; and, a focus on a holistic view of programming as a profession, with a beginning and a middle and an end, that can span a lifetime.

I am proud that my company, Obtiva, in collaboration with 8th Light, is organizing Software Craftsmanship North America. I am also excited to participate in the panel discussion, "The Business of Craftsmanship" with my friends, Carl Erikson and Micah Martin.