The Firehose

I am wrapping up the manuscript for this book (deadline on 10/17) and just wrote the first pass at a "Perpetual Learning" pattern named "Expand Your Bandwidth".  I ended the pattern with my 3 experiences using it. I thought it would make sense to post my stories here:

When I was given the opportunity to learn my first programming language by my employer in late 2000, I began Expanding my Bandwidth immediately. I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do, so after I read a couple Perl books, I looked for any possible opportunity to learn more. I was determined to reach the next level as a Perl developer as quickly as possible and knew that just taking one book at a time wasn't going to be fast enough (I'm competitive, OK?). So I joined perlmonks.org, asked and answered questions on comp.lang.perl.misc, attended a couple Perl Mongers meetings, and started playing Perl Golf (yes, competitively). After about a year of this, I had to scale down my intake for the sake of my sanity and marriage. But I had made progress, and had many more resources at my disposal when I found myself stumped.

Then, in the spring of 2002 I read Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained and saw an opportunity to grow beyond Perl into the world of test-driven development, pair programming, object-oriented design, and design patterns. Once again I Expanded my Bandwidth and read a pile of excellent books, started attending a local agile software development user group, paid my way to XP/Agile Universe conference (thankfully held near my home that year), participated on the extreme programming mailing list, started reading relevant blogs, and subsequently started blogging. The outcome of this season of Expanding my Bandwidth won me a job at ThoughtWorks, a transnational agile consulting company. My career and apprenticeship were forever changed by the learning opportunities that ThoughtWorks presented me.

As I transitioned from apprentice to journeyman toward the end of 2005, I saw another opportunity on the horizon: Ruby on Rails was on the rise. I strategically Expanded my Bandwidth in order to take advantage of the market opportunity that this presented. This allowed me to join Obtiva, a local consulting company that better fit my lifestyle, where I founded Obtiva's Software Studio and kick-started Obtiva's apprenticeship program. Expand Your Bandwidth is an extremely powerful pattern when used strategically. Just remember to turn it off periodically. :)