Breakable Toys

In this apprentice pattern, I took a look at "Breakable Toys."  I think this chapter is really interesting since it encourages developers to gain as much experience as possible through failures within a field that only a small gap for error. The pattern first presented the contradiction where developers are not allowed to make much mistakes, but those mistakes are the one that teach us the most in order to be better. The author moved on to present a simplest solution, which is to create our own safe space to experiment with new technologies by doing personal projects. I think this is a must do for a lot of developers who wants to improve themselves as it not only gain experience through making a lot of trials and errors, it can act as some kind of record to show employer that we are competent at this particular skill, technology, or language. Then the author talks about the main thing of this pattern, which is “breakable toys.” The term sounds confusing at first, but it seems to just simply be a wiki, calendar, address book that allows ourselves to store what we learn so that we can look back when we forget about it. Another concept for “breakable toys” that the author mentioned are games like Tic-Tac-Toe, blogging software or IRC clients, which allows us to experiment and get knowledges from other.

The reason why I chose this pattern because I think this is essential for myself, as well as a lot of developers to know about. I do use a lot of “breakable toys” and I think they are pretty neat to have in a lot of situation. Until this day, I still have a lot of unfinished personal projects in my backlog and those I can always use as a reference when I could not remember how to solve a problem, and a lot of them are featured in my resume to shows employers what I am capable of, which significantly boost my position in this competitive field.

After reading this pattern, it made me realized the importance of “breakable toys”, and also provide me with some more brilliant ideas like wikis for problems or building a game of choice out of every language that I learn. This pattern also helped me see more about the importance of practicing outside of work environment, provide myself a much better opportunity to experiment and make errors without having to worry about getting in trouble.