Craft Over Art Pattern~

Hello!

Welcome back to the blog. This week I am discussing the Craft Over Art pattern from “Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman” by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye.

The context of this pattern is that you are being paid to make something to solve a problem for a customer. The problem is that there is already a solution for how to fix that problem, but you would be able to come up with something creative to address the problem that would impress your coworkers. 

The pattern discusses that being a craftsman is impacted by relationships we build with others–we should work to build strong connections with customers, making sure we deliver to them something of quality. We shouldn’t aim to focus on our own interests. You should be working to the best of your ability but also keeping the customer’s best interests in mind. Part of our growth is being able to give up the opportunity to make something beautiful and instead create something useful when needed.

The pattern advises that in the next 24 hours you work on something to be useful rather than beautiful, and to think about what you should be focusing on while you make the decision on making something useful. You should also reflect on your past experiences where you tried to do something creative rather than follow an already-made path for solving a problem and the result of it, and what would have happened if you chose to use a previously established solution.

I thought that this pattern was an interesting read. Throughout the patterns, I’ve been seeing that we should work to hone our skills and not get too comfortable with certain activities–try to branch out some more or we may get stuck. And this pattern is saying that although we should exercise our skills, we need to find a balance between creating something ingenious and creating something based on an already existing solution. I think this is important to think about when doing work. Of course, I think it would be great if you could figure out new ways to do things. But it’s also important to deliver products to the customer in a timely manner, and it may be too resource consuming to create something from scratch as the pattern mentions. I don’t have any disagreements with this pattern. It would be great to develop the ability to know when to sacrifice utility vs beauty and it would definitely be on my mind when I need to solve a problem in the future. I usually tend to look for any known solutions and make slight adjustments to the solutions when necessary.