‘Find Your Mentors’ Pattern

The ‘Find Your Mentors’ pattern is about the idea of “apprenticing” yourself to someone who is more experienced than you are within your field of expertise. While this pattern should be considered for many different professions it should especially be considered for software development as having a mentor can be very helpful especially when you are trying to find your place in the huge world of software. One of the main ideas attached to this pattern is that you will have the realization that you are not the first person to start out being a software developer with little experience professionally as everyone that is currently in the field had to start at the same spot you are currently at and their knowledge can be beneficial to you in order to shape your own career and practices. The solution provided for this pattern is finding a master craftsmen in order to be supervised by them and have the proposed master shape your understanding of the field and your career, but it is also said that with computer science being a relatively ‘young’ field it is hard to find a true master as their are not many people that have ‘mastered’ all of computer science but that there are many people who may have mastered parts of computer science and you should seek out different people in order to increase your understanding of what each mentor you obtain has mastered in their time in the field.

I feel as though this pattern is very important because computer science is younger than many other fields and mentors can be hard to come by in fields which have many ‘masters’ nevermind fields which have very few like computer science. Explaining that it is ok and completely acceptable for a software developer to have many mentors throughout their professional journey in the different disciplines of computer science helps students such as myself realize that you can continue to explore further and further into the field without having to necessarily pick a specific discipline and settle to work on only that discipline for our entire careers but instead that we should feel encouraged to gain more knowledge as knowledge on other disciplines can help us to gain understanding within whichever discipline we are currently working within.