The Deep End Pattern~

For this week, I wanted to read over and discuss the Deep End pattern from “Apprenticeship Patterns” by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. 

The Deep End pattern can apply when you’ve only taken safe steps or have only worked with what you’re comfortable with, and you’re starting to feel that where you’re at is hurting you. You feel that you need to expand your knowledge and what you can work with. So, this means that you have to start working on more complex projects or tasks, maybe more high-stakes projects. You shouldn’t jump blindly into a complex project, but you should first prepare or gauge what you’d be able to do. If you take on something unprepared, it could just have a negative impact on you. The pattern gives a warning to make sure you don’t take on something that you may have no foothold in at first–with an example of Enrique Riepenhausen moving out of the country to act as a consultant for a client in Nigeria, but knows the language and someone who lives there.

To work on this issue, the pattern says to think of the projects you have worked on. Then, write about the scope of the project–complexity, how many lines of code, how many developers, etc. From these answers, you can give projects a rating or make a general scale of their complexity and compare new projects to the scale and use it as a tool to help you reach your career goals.

I thought that the pattern was useful in the way that it says you should measure/compare complexity of your past projects that you can use to then compare to future project opportunities. It would be a good way to see that it is complex enough to boost your skills instead of being something on the lower end of complexity that wouldn’t launch you forward. I do agree that we should take on something more difficult so we can learn more things–for example, I knew how to do little tasks for my internship, but I hadn’t written code for a report before and worked on a template nor a form–basically a bunch of aspects I had not touched before–and had the task of working on them. And I’m glad I did, because I learned so much from that complex project that I can now apply to so many more. I also did not step into it completely blind, because I had coworkers who could help me if I really needed, and a knowledge database available. I think it would be interesting to think about my portfolio this way moving on. I do not have any disagreements with the pattern.