An apprenticeship pattern attempts to offer guidance to someone working with the craft model on the ways in which they can improve the progress of their career. All our patterns have been extracted from our own experiences and those of the people we have interviewed. Like any good collection of patterns, they should strike you as unoriginal precisely because the people around you are already using them. The other quality that these patterns share is that of generativity. Every time you apply them you should get different results, and if they’re used in the appropriate contexts they should improve your working environment. These are not algorithms that guarantee the same results on every execution. Instead they are tools that solve one set of problems and create new ones. The trick is to use your judgment to choose the problems you prefer.

This book is organized as a pattern language. A pattern language is an interconnected set of solutions to common problems in a specific domain. The original pattern language was written by Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language, where he described over 250 patterns for designing everything from kitchens to houses to cities and even societies. Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck introduced pattern languages to the software industry in the 1990s, resulting in countless articles, books, and even conferences focused on design patterns. The best-known example of software design patterns literature is Design Patterns by “The Gang of Four” though Martin Fowler’s Refactoring is a better example of a pattern language. To be clear, the book you’re reading is not a book about designing software. Rather, it is a book about designing the beginning of your career in software development and setting yourself up to become great at what you do.