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"How long will it take to master aikido?" a prospective student asks. "How long do you expect to live?" is the only respectable response.
George Leonard, Mastery
To become truly good at programming is a life's work, an ongoing enterprise of learning and practicing.
Ron Jeffries et al, Extreme Programming Installed
For every step you take toward mastery, your destination moves two steps further away. Embrace mastery as a lifelong endeavor. Learn to love the journey.
George Leonard, Mastery
The Long Road is for people aspiring to become masters of software craftsmanship. This long (yet bright) journey will bring out of you a rich set of abilities. You will become an expert at learning, problem solving, and developing strong relationships with your customers. You will come to wield knowledge and technology as the samurai uses his short and long swords. You will come to comprehend and appreciate the deeper truths of software development.
The Long Road is not for people aspiring to become CIOs, project managers, or wealthy. Yet, along the way, it is not unlikely that you will find yourself taking on roles of power and resposibility or the recipient of significant amounts of money. But these roles and benefits are not what the successful apprentice aspires to. They are by-products of a lifelong journey. Rather than counting the days to retirement, the craftsman will willingly and joyfully work into his final decades.
One of the primary goals of this work is to encourage software developers to walk The Long Road. The patterns in this chapter combine to help apprentices remain on the path to mastery. We don't want to give the impression that what we call The Long Road is a single road (see Chapter 13, Draw Your Own Map) or that it's the right road for every software developer (see Chapter 16, A Different Road). Some people leave development permanently and become executives, testers, salesmen, or project managers. Some people leave technology permanently and enter into entirely different fields. This is a great and necessary thing, and these are the right roads for them. But this book and The Long Road are not for those people.
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