Do you have training and achievement certificates hanging around your cubicle? Back when Dave had his very own cube and even less experience than he does now, he conspicuously piled a stack of certificates near his desk. The pile featured a Brainbench "master" certification in Perl and grew to inclue certificates proving that he had completed various multi-day trainings in C, J2EE, Vignette, and ATG Dynamo. This small stack of pseudo-parchment reassured him (and his organization) that Dave knew what he was doing. He had been trained.

Meanwhile, Dave had started to [Expand His Bandwidth]: through perlmonks.org and the comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups he had discovered some exceptional Perl hackers. The hackers' expertise was daunting, particularly because Dave could see that they were still learning, and fast. It began to dawn on him that he had barely scratched the surface of what it meant to be a great software developer. Over the following months, his pile of certificates slowly disappeared beneath a larger pile of scratchpaper and print-outs of book drafts and tutorials.

Through his observations and interactions with a few of these exceptional hackers, Dave was captured by the learning process. Periodically he would catch a glimpse of the depth and breadth of the hackers' knowledge and come away either discouraged or inspired. Dave was discouraged by how little he understood, yet inspired by the power of these hackers' abilities. He threw himself into his Chapter 22, Breakable Toys and began to [Read Constantly].

The more Dave learned, the more he recognized how far he had to go. Over the next couple years he had the good fortune to collaborate face-to-face with some exceptional software developers. Dave saw that although these exceptional people were miles ahead of him, they were walking the same road...

The patterns that directly support an apprentice's journey on Chapter 9, The Long Road can be assembled into myriad combinations. Their ordering in this chapter does not imply a linear progression. For example...

You may be walking Chapter 9, The Long Road with relative ease. Your working environment is not stifling you, your passion for the craft is strong. You are excelling. You receive a promotion to what your organization calls "architect" and you are still programming full-time. Your [Accurate Self-Assessment] informs you that it's time to Chapter 14, Use Your Title. Simply [Using Your Title] to gauge the level of your organization may be enough to keep you on Chapter 9, The Long Road, it might be that no other patterns are needed.

...or...

Your organization might emphasize financial rewards. There is a constant, unspoken organizational undercurrent that pressures people to focus on making more money, because, after all, making more money means you're more valuable to the company. You recognize the undercurrent and the danger it presents to your journey. You Chapter 12, Nurture Your Passion and focus on maintaining Chapter 11, Sustainable Motivations. Your focus on Chapter 10, Craft Over Art has grown your reputation and you have been offered a promotion to project manager. By Staying In The Trenches and Drawing Your Own Map you work with your employer to define a career path that will keep you on Chapter 9, The Long Road.

...or...

You have been programming since you were very young. You program because you enjoy creating beautiful, elegant solutions. But now, in the corporate world, you are faced with tasks that are not enjoyable and with customers who need you to deliver functionality, and they don't care about elegance. You recognize that for the foreseeable future, your motivation for programming is not aligned with Chapter 9, The Long Road. You take steps to Chapter 12, Nurture Your Passion as you develop more Chapter 11, Sustainable Motivations by focusing on Chapter 10, Craft Over Art. You gradually develop a motivation to establish strong relationships with your customers.

The possibilities are as limitless as the contexts that apprentices live within.