Today it is the 5th anniversary of the Manifesto for Software Craftmanship and Doug Bradbury encouraged us to give our opinion regarding the status of professionalism in the last years. I would like to share in this, my first post in English, my experience about how I feel that it has changed.
Do you think that the bar of professionalism has been raised in the 5 years since the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto was published? Why or why not?
I started working in my first job more than 7 years ago and there I found some people that cared about their job and felt frustrated because of not being able to do it better. We knew that the things were not right, but often we lacked a guidance that could help us to realize what and how could we start fixing the things.
Some time later we knew the Agile community and the pieces started to fit for me. I found myself surrounded by a lot of people that really cared what they did and wanted to learn everyday how to do it better. I started hearing about Software Craftsmanship and I was really motivated after finding more people that didn’t thought that this work was only about doing 8 hours or just typing.
Since then, I always try to do the best of my job. I try to solve problems, not just to implement features, I try to be always responsible of my job and overall, I try to create things that I would like to sign as any craftsman would do with his work.
I consider myself really lucky because I found very good masters on my way and currently I have a lot of local communities around where people is willing to share what they know. That’s why now I’m also trying to add my two cents starting with some small talks, encouraging people to go to community events, creating new groups and hopefully, from now on, sharing some more things again in this forgotten blog.
In summary, I cannot categorically state that the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto has raised the bar of professionalism in the profession, but I can state that it helped me to find more people with the same concerns that I have, that it showed me how much I still need to learn until I can have work that I would sign proudly and it motivated me to look for good masters and be a master for the ones that are in an earlier stage of the path.
