Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.
You are months or years into your apprenticeship and you find yourself discouraged by the culture of your development organization.
Organizational cultures that encourage software craftsmanship are rare. You find yourself stranded without mentors and in an atmosphere that seems at odds with your aspirations.
To keep your momentum going, especially in the absence of a full-time mentor, you need to be in frequent contact with people who are walking a similar road. Therefore you should seek out people like yourself who are also looking to excel.
The Long Road is not a road that anyone walks alone, and particularly during the years of your apprenticeship, you need camaraderie. This pattern is simple in principle, and for some people (our extroverted cohorts) it is simple in practice. For others, however, it can be difficult. Some relationships are brief but career-changing; others are long-lasting and help Nurture Your Passion. The following stories provide examples of the power of Kindred Spirits.
Dave read Extreme Programming Explained in 2002 and dove headfirst into the XP and Agile community. He paid his own way to attend XP/Agile Universe 2002, which was conveniently hosted in a nearby suburb of Chicago. While at the conference, Dave met Roman, whom he had already been introduced to online through a local user group mailing list. Dave and Roman agreed to meet for lunch to discuss Joshua Kerievsky’s book-in-progress Refactoring to Patterns. Roman worked at a large, multinational bank and Dave worked at an old, bloated nonprofit; not surprisingly, they both enjoyed the escape from the mediocrity of their respective development organizations and met every week for several years. They didn’t end up discussing Joshua’s book (because Dave first needed to read Refactoring and Design Patterns) but spent their time in all sorts of ways, discussing other books like Peopleware, learning Ruby on Dave’s laptop, sharing horror stories, and offering each other solutions to the various problems they encountered over the years.
Steve Tooke told us a story of meeting Shane in 2004 while working for a company in Manchester, England. Steve was an enthusiastic young programmer, and Shane was an experienced developer based in New Zealand. Although they were thousands of miles apart, their interactions were career-altering for Steve. Shane introduced him to books like Design Patterns, which gave them a shared language to describe the object-oriented designs they were working on together. The communication roadblocks of being separated by many time zones meant that Shane couldn’t provide much direct mentoring, but for Steve, the connection itself and the knowledge that there was someone else in his development organization who was dedicated to excellence made a huge difference in his work.
Mentors are people who you want to emulate, and therefore can often feel a bit removed and sometimes intimidating. On the other hand, your community provides a safe environment for exploration and learning. Perhaps you are interested in advanced JavaScript, and one of your Kindred Spirits is investigating Haskell. You can feel free to show each other what you’re learning and have no obligation to follow the other’s lead. This is different from a mentor-based relationship, where the apprentice might feel obliged to drop his interest in JavaScript and pursue Haskell simply because the mentor sees it as a superior language, disregarding the fact that the apprentice needs to learn JavaScript for his current project. Keep this in mind and complement the Find Mentors pattern with a community of Kindred Spirits with whom you can let down your guard.
Despite the many benefits of a community of like-minded folk, you must also be aware of group-think. Force yourself to retain the capacity to ask questions that shock your community. Try to use that little bit of intellectual distance to generate the kind of respectful dissent that will keep your community healthy. Your community’s health can be measured in the way it reacts to new ideas. Does it embrace the idea after vigorous debate and experimentation? Or does it quickly reject the idea and the person who proposed it? Today’s dissident is tomorrow’s leader, and one of the most valuable services you can provide to your community is defending it against those who believe that marching in lockstep is the price of membership.
List all the communities you could potentially join based on the tools you use, the languages you know, the people you have worked with, the blogs you read, and the ideas you are intrigued by. Identify which of those groups gather in the real world in your city. One by one, attend all these gatherings, and decide which groups seem most interesting.
What if none of the groups regularly meet near you? In that case, you’ve just been given a golden opportunity to create one of these gatherings. Start a regular meetup of software craftsmen in your region. It’s a lot less work than you would think. Just don’t make the mistake of restricting the membership or the topics too early. Instead, advertise anywhere and everywhere that software developers in your region might see it.
As your group grows, feel free to explore a wide and bizarre range of topics until you have a core group of irregulars. Over time, that self-selected group of irregulars will define the nature of your group. You won’t always have the same people attending every fortnight—that’s what makes them irregulars. Groups like the Extreme Tuesday Club have a few hundred “members”; on any given Tuesday there will only be a dozen or so people in attendance. If your group becomes large enough and energetic enough, it will sustain itself even when you are not there. That’s when you know you have a community.