Since writing the book I have come across many master craftsmen, unfortunately most are not software developers. All have been active in their chosen craft for at least 20 years, some for over 40 years and this has caused me to start asking the question:

What does 20 years of improvement look like?

Craftsmanship is about mastery, and mastery takes time. As humans we would like to think that we can learn things quickly, but the reality is that mastery takes time, a lot of time. The old ideas that come from craftsmanship can be usefully applied to our field of software development, we just need to hink about how to apply those ideas in our current context and environment.

A large part of applying craftsmanship to software development requires us to take a longer term look at what we do, and the context we do it in, but there are some ideas that we can apply that have a more immediate effect.