Software development often involves a large variety of interconnected tools, patterns, standards and ideas which must be understood at a functional level to be able successfully apply them to the project at hand. Sometimes the sheer number of things which require your understanding can feel overwhelming, and going into a project without knowing absolutely everything you might need to know often leads to stress regarding the gaps in knowledge versus what is required.
The pattern discussed in chapter 2 of Apprenticeship Patterns, (link: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/Apprenticeship+Patterns/9780596806842/ch02s06.html) discusses the idea of confronting your ignorance, by which the authors mean that you should seek out and eliminate any holes or gaps in your knowledge, rather than allowing the “ignorance” to be a detriment to yourself. More specifically, the pattern describes the process of picking one skill, language or technology to focus on at a time, and working to better your understanding of that one idea. Rather than trying to focus on everything at once, you focus on learning one skill at a time, generating a more “precise” understanding of it than if it were being lumped together with other subjects.
This idea makes a lot of sense, intuitively you might think it would be second nature to begin learning a new topic by focusing only on that topic instead of trying to do everything all at the same time, but often that is exactly what ends up happening. Whenever there is a larger “stack” of tools to learn, I sometimes find myself actively trying to absorb everything all at once, because I feel that maybe slowing down and taking each single tool or topic on by itself might slow things down too much. This hesitance not to “multitask” when learning new ideas makes it harder to really focus on any one thing when trying to become familiar with a large number of tools and ideas in a short timeframe.
Overall the major ideas of Confront Your Ignorance are simple, and easy to implement , the big drawback being the time it will likely take to focus exclusively on one topic can often take time away from other activities. Like most patterns discussed in Apprenticeship Patterns, finding an effective balance between this pattern and others is important and likely dependent on context most of the time.
Book Referenced:
Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman
https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/Apprenticeship+Patterns/9780596806842/ch02s06.html
CodeRoad 