This document discusses craftsmanship training and professional practices for software development. It emphasizes taking responsibility for mistakes, practicing deliberately to improve skills, and gaining expertise through 10,000 hours of practice over time. Specific techniques recommended include code katas, studying algorithms, and continuously learning through blogs, conferences and other resources. The focus is on improving skills and offering value through ongoing learning and practice.

1. Professional Practices |
Craftsmanship Training |
Part 1
Chencha Jacob
iHub Tech Lead
www.ihub.co.ke
@jchex

2. A different mindset
Craftsmanship mindset
Your focus is in what value you are offering to the world
Passion mindset
What value the world is offering to you

3. Whoops!
You just shipped a module in your SAAS package that broke the product costing
your company Ksh 100,000 what do you do?

4. Taking Responsibility
- Your career is your responsibility
- You must continually practise
- Never learn on your client's time

5. Why you should care?
- Wasting time is an insidious form of suicide
- How do we waste time?
- Software product that’s never used
- Redoing work
- Unneeded features

6. The 10,000-Hour Rule
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum
level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. Infact,
researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true
expertise: ten thousand hours.
- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

7. Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is an activity designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole
purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance
- Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert
Performance

8. Experience is the only teacher
Code Katas
A kata is an exercise in karate where you repeat a form many, many times, making
little improvements in each
http://codekata.com/

9. Chess master
1. Look into requirements specification, an implemented RFC or popular algorithm. Check this book by Dr. SedgewickAlgorithms for
inspiration
2. Write out your own implementation of the algorithm
3. Look for an implementation of the algorithm, if you are using Sedgewick’s book, you will find code samples.
4. Evaluate the proposed solution against your own
5. Note the differences between what you did and what the authors did
6. Rinse and repeat

10. Fire up the hose
- Get a blog aggregator
- Start following luminaries on twitter, github, medium
- Subscribe to mailing list, stackexchange or even code triage
- Join user groups
- Attend a technical conference
- Subscribe to podcasts

11. QUESTIONS?

12. Where to find me
- Follow me on twitter @jchex
- Subscribe to my blog blog.chenchatech.com